I was debugging some issues with Anaconda after an update to macOS Catalina recently and noticed that ~/.conda/envs was added to the configuration. This has broken a number dev environments for me, and I'm wondering...
Why am I seeing this new location for conda environments? Can I remove it and continue to use and create environments solely in ~/anaconda3/envs?
conda info
...
envs directories : /Users/me/.conda/envs
/Users/me/anaconda3/envs
...
According to this GitHub issue, the purpose of ~/.conda/envs is to provide conda with at least one directory that is guaranteed to be writable by the user.
The
~/.condadirectory is no longer used on Windows, only unix. Conda's install location is not guaranteed to be user-writable. Conda always needs at least one user-writable location for the package cache (pkgs directory) and the envs directory where new named environments are created. The default location for these directories is~/.condaon unix, and on Windows we use appdirs. The~/.condadirectory has been used for years on unix for this purpose.When conda's install location is user-writable, then that's the location chosen as "first writable" for these two directories. When conda's install location is not writable by the current user, then conda uses the
~/.condadirectory as the writable location, but is still able to use the install location for a read-only package cache and named environments. Compare output ofconda config --showfor the two different cases.The locations of these directories can be overrode by configuration using the
envs_dirsandpkgs_dirsconfiguration parameters, orCONDA_ENVS_DIRSandCONDA_PKGS_DIRSenvironment variables.
It should be safe to install environments only into ~/anaconda3/envs, as long as that is writable by the current user. For example, I only install environments into ~/miniconda3/envs and have faced no issues.