How can I rename a conda environment

Question

I have a conda environment named old name  how can I change its name to new name without breaking references

User · Answer

conda should have given us a simple tool like cond env rename <old> <new> but it hasn't. Simply renaming the directory, as in this previous answer, of course, breaks the hardcoded hashbangs(#!). Hence, we need to go one more level deeper to achieve what we want.

conda env list
# conda environments:
#
base                  *  /home/tgowda/miniconda3
junkdetect               /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/junkdetect
rtg                      /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/rtg

Here I am trying to rename rtg --> unsup (please bear with those names, this is my real use case)

$ cd /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs 
$ OLD=rtg
$ NEW=unsup
$ mv $OLD $NEW   # rename dir

$ conda env list
# conda environments:
#
base                  *  /home/tgowda/miniconda3
junkdetect               /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/junkdetect
unsup                    /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/unsup


$ conda activate $NEW
$ which python
  /home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/unsup/bin/python

the previous answer reported upto this, but wait, we are not done yet! the pending task is, $NEW/bin dir has a bunch of executable scripts with hashbangs (#!) pointing to the $OLD env paths.

See jupyter, for example:

$ which jupyter
/home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/unsup/bin/jupyter

$ head -1 $(which jupyter) # its hashbang is still looking at old
#!/home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/rtg/bin/python

So, we can easily fix it with a sed

$ sed  -i.bak "s:envs/$OLD/bin:envs/$NEW/bin:" $NEW/bin/*  
# `-i.bak` created backups, to be safe

$ head -1 $(which jupyter) # check if updated
#!/home/tgowda/miniconda3/envs/unsup/bin/python
$ jupyter --version # check if it works
jupyter core     : 4.6.3
jupyter-notebook : 6.0.3

$ rm $NEW/bin/*.bak  # remove backups

Now we are done

I think it should be trivial to write a portable script to do all those and bind it to conda env rename old new.

I tested this on ubuntu. For whatever unforseen reasons, if things break and you wish to revert the above changes:

$ mv $NEW  $OLD
$ sed  -i.bak "s:envs/$NEW/bin:envs/$OLD/bin:" $OLD/bin/*

User · Answer

I m using Conda on Windows and this answer did not work for me  But I can suggest another solution   rename enviroment folder  old name to new name   open shell and activate env with custom folder  conda bat activate  quot C  Users USER NAME Miniconda3 envs new name quot   now you can use this enviroment  but it s not on the enviroment list  Update install remove any package to fix it  For example  update numpy  conda update numpy  after applying any action to package  the environment will show in env list  To check this  type  conda env list

User · Answer

You can rename your Conda env by just renaming the env folder  Here is the proof   You can find your Conda env folder inside of C  ProgramData Anaconda3 envs or you can enter conda env list to see the list of conda envs and its location

User · Answer

conda create --name new name --copy --clone old name is better  I use conda create --name new name --clone old name which is without --copy but encountered pip breaks     the following url may help Installing tensorflow in cloned conda environment breaks conda environment it was cloned from

User · Answer

You can t   One workaround is to create clone environment  and then remove original one    remember about deactivating current environment with deactivate on Windows and source deactivate on macOS Linux   conda create --name new name --clone old name conda remove --name old name --all   or its alias   conda env remove --name old name    There are several drawbacks of this method    it redownloads packages - you can use --offline flag to disable it  time consumed on copying environment s files  temporary double disk usage    There is an open issue requesting this feature

User · Answer

Based upon dwanderson s helpful comment  I was able to do this in a Bash one-liner   conda create --name envpython2 --file  lt  conda list -n env1 -e     My badly named env was  env1  and the new one I wish to clone from it is  envpython2

[python] How can I rename a conda environment?

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