Initial creation of conda environment ran for over 12 hours with no resolution (description of a fix included)

[mrcox5]

Here is the set of commands I run to improve the speed of the installer/environment creation.

I opened a cmd prompt from Anaconda Navigator, then input the following commands:

conda update -n base conda
conda install -n base conda-libmamba-solver
conda config --set solver libmamba

This seemed to work much more rapidly. Documentation about the toolkit and this setup can be found here: https://www.anaconda.com/blog/a-faster-conda-for-a-growing-community and here https://www.anaconda.com/blog/conda-is-fast-now

I do want to note that this is just to handle the library solver issues of conda with the faster mamba toolkit. Unfortunately, this works on the assumption that the “conda update -n base conda” line completes in a reasonable amount of time. From what I found, it seems like the conda devs recommend keeping the base environment as sparse as possible to avoid this issue. There is also an option to “reset” the base environment to one that only includes conda dependencies (which I also attempted, which did not complete in ~ 1 hour).

If someone wants to forego conda completely, there is a completely separate install of mamba that should act as a free-standing dropin for conda; see https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mamba-installation.html

I also saw comments on forums mentioning issues getting mamba to run outside of the base environment. Supposedly this issue was fixed by the devs, but this may be a reason to use the conda-libmamba-solver instead; conda seems to use a “bin” folder that can be found by other environments to avoid this same issue.