Clone base environment in anaconda

Question

My conda version is 4.7.11. I am trying to clone the base env to a new one so I can install some specific packages and will not mess up the base environment. I tried as some other answers suggested:

conda create --name <myenv> --clone base

and

conda create --name <myenv> --clone root

But none of them works. The message from terminal is "The system cannot find the file specified".

Below is my cuurent env list:

base                  *  D:\LabTest\Dave\Anaconda
dlc-windowsCPU           D:\LabTest\Dave\Anaconda\envs\dlc-windowsCPU
dlc-windowsGPU           D:\LabTest\Dave\Anaconda\envs\dlc-windowsGPU
dlc-windowsGPU-dave      D:\LabTest\Dave\Anaconda\envs\dlc-windowsGPU-dave
dlc-windowsGPU-yc        D:\LabTest\Dave\Anaconda\envs\dlc-windowsGPU-yc

I also cannot clone from my anaconda navigator.

Don't know what to do.

Answer 1

您只需要引用称为base而不是root的基本环境：

conda create --name <myenv> --clone base

Answer 2

I would recommend that you try the method as shown on this official documentation . In summary, you can get all the list of modules installed in the virtual environment, save it as a .txt file, and create a new environment from that .txt file. For example,

conda list --explicit > spec-file.txt

Then, create a new environment using that specification.

conda create --name myenv --file spec-file.txt

While this is not exactly "cloning" the base environment, you should be able to reproduce a virtual environment identical to the base through this process.

Answer 3

What I usually do when creating new env is the below command:

conda create --clone pytorch --name pytorch1.6

Where pytorch is the environment that I am cloning to pytorch1.6 which I'll be updating to the latest nightly build. My reason for cloning is to avoid configuration of Cuda all over again :) Documentation or rather official cheatsheet lives here