How to install Julia in an anaconda environment?

Question

One of the main features of Anaconda is that it is language agnostic as stated in their blog:

You can create environments of any binary dependency tree (different versions of Python, R, Julia, etc.).

Recently I switched from using virtualenv to Anaconda in Python, so I was curious to try Julia in an Anaconda environment. However, I couldn't find instructions explicit enough to install Julia successfully. First, I tried naively conda create -n julia-test julia. Obviously, it didn't work. Then I found at binstar.org a Julia package (version 0.3) with the code

conda install -c https://conda.binstar.org/wakari1 julia 

However, I don't want to install Julia outside of a specific virtual environment, so I changed it to:

conda create -n julia-test -c https://conda.binstar.org/wakari1 julia 

It didn't throw errors but ultimately failed to start the Julia interpreter.

So, what is the correct way of installing Julia (0.2, preferably) in an anaconda environment?

UPDATE

As of March 2018, Julia v0.6.1 is available for linux-64 on the conda-forge channel:

https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/julia

It has been set up to install packages inside <env_prefix>/share/julia/site, to maintain isolation from the user's ~/.julia user's home directory.

conda create -n julia -c conda-forge julia

Answer 1

As of August 2017, Julia v0.5.2 is available on the conda-forge channel:

https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/julia

It has been set up to install packages inside <env_prefix>/share/julia/site, to maintain isolation from the user's ~/.julia user's home directory.

conda create -n julia -c conda-forge julia

Answer 2

The blog post was indicating that conda is general enough to allow packages of any type. There are no packages for Julia yet (except for the one you found in the Wakari channel, which is specific to Wakari).

Building a conda package for Julia and probably isn't difficult. Building a streamlined way to convert Julia packages into conda packages is a bit more work.