PackageNotFoundError when creating new Conda environment

Question

After installing Anaconda or Miniconda and trying to create first environment, I'm getting the following error:

PackageNotFoundError: Package not found: '' Package missing in current osx-64 channels: - package_name

Answer 1

It turns out that when you first run conda config ( .condarc is created) by default it contains

create_default_packages:
  - tensorflow
  - PACKAGE_NAME
channels:
  - conda-forge
  - defaults

So it tries to fetch a package called PACKAGE_NAME which surprisingly does not exist.

Simply removing - PACKAGE_NAME line from .condarc fixes the issue.