Conda per-environment channels

Advantages of conda over pip include:

  • distributing per-platform optimized libraries
  • prioritized channels resolve version conflicts, helping mitigate Python package dependency hell

Conda channel priority order is ordered by which channel appears first (highest) in .condarc. We generally recommend adding per-environment channels rather than modifying the global configuration to avoid corrupting multiple environments with incompatible packages`.

In general “strict” channel priority is recommended to mitigate compatibility problems.

conda config --set channel_priority strict

conda config --get channel_priority

Add a conda per-environment channel:

conda activate <env-name>

conda config --env --add channels <channel-name>

Get the current channel list for an environment:

conda activate <env-name>

conda config --env --show channels