Installing mamba on a machine with conda

Question

I dont know if I have missed it, but this is not clear to me. I already have miniconda on my machine and I want now to install mamba. How this should be done please, I am supposed to download/run the correct mambaforge installer? Does this co-exist happily side by side with conda or you are supposed to have just one of them on your system. Doing something like conda install mamba is not recommended

Answer 1

Mamba can theoretically be added to any install, but is no longer recommended.¹ Since Mamba is only distributed through Conda Forge, one must convert base to having the conda-forge channel prioritized. Be aware that this is generally incompatible with Anaconda base², but can work fine with Miniconda base.

Essentially,

## prioritize 'conda-forge' channel
conda config --add channels conda-forge

## update existing packages to use 'conda-forge' channel
conda update -n base --all

## install 'mamba'
conda install -n base mamba

Now you can use mamba instead of conda.

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_{[1]: Mamba developers recommend installing Miniforge as a base, since it prioritizes conda-forge channel by default.}

_{[2]: The need to prioritize conda-forge channel is effectively incompatible with the Anaconda base because the combination of a large environment (Anaconda) and plus a larger package search space (Conda Forge) make the solution space enormous. Basically every question on SO about things taking infinitely long to solve is really about this. If you are starting from Anaconda base you'll want to first gut out the base environment to be minimal (remove the anaconda package).}

Answer 2

Mamba is a replacement conda package manager. They do not co-exist happily as they both rely on a base environment for their dependencies. The recommended way is to install mambaforge or micromamba separately as a replacement.

documentation for Mamba: https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/mamba-installation.html

documentation for Micromamba: https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/micromamba-installation.html