Specify Python version when cloning base conda environment

Question

I am trying to create a Python 2 environment on Anaconda3 that clones all of the packages from the base environment. I know that conda create --name myenv --clone base creates a clone using the currently acquired version of Python, but is there a way to specify the version when doing this?

So far I have tried specifying the version like conda create --name test_env --clone base python=2.7 but got the error TooManyArgumentsError: did not expect any arguments for --clone Got 1 argument (python=2.7) but expected 0.

Answer 1

You don't need to clone the base in this case. For example, I installed the latest Anaconda with version 3.9, but not everything works with it, I needed Python 3.8.

This worked for me:

conda create -n "py38" python=3.8 anaconda 

From below, you can see that it worked: