Activating conda environment with its full path

Question

Usually, we activate a conda environment with the command:

source activate env_name

Is it possible to activate conda environment with its full path? For example:

source (fullpath)/bin/activate

When I do this it activates the default environment of anaconda i.e the root environment.

Solution 1

Update for conda 4.4 and up:

You need to specify the conda environment path to activate. The new conda activate command should not need the full path to an "activate script" any longer, since the command is now "built-in" to conda. So something like:

conda activate (fullpath)/env-name-here

should work.

---

The command you have specified activates the root environment because you have not given conda an environment to activate, and root is the default. If you want to activate a particular environment, you can certainly do so with the full path to the activate script, for instance

source (full path to main Anaconda directory)/bin/activate (fullpath)/env-name-here
                                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                                           You're missing this part

Solution 2

You can activate an environment that is not in your conda environment list by passing the path to the environment. For example you can create an environment in any directory you want with the -p argument. Like so:

conda create -p /path/to/some/location/mytestenv/ python=3.5

This will NOT show up in conda env list, but you can activate it with:

source activate /path/to/some/location/mytestenv

Comments

[Pierre-Luc Bertrand]

Grr has it right. The full path goes in the <env-name-here> as opposed to be in the activate command.

[darthbith]

Hmm... what if the activate script isn't on your PATH? Possibly you need the full path to the activate script and the full path to the environment.

[Pierre-Luc Bertrand]

You could potentially rephrase it as source (fullpath)/env-name-here/bin/activate (fullpath)/env-name-here.

[darthbith]

@Pierre-LucBertrand I think the activate script should still be from the main Anaconda/Miniconda directory. Also, one should no longer use the source method, the new method (with conda 4.4) is conda activate which means you definitely don't need the path to the activate script, since the activate command is built-in to conda now

[merv]

Not sure when it changed, but this definitely will show up in conda env list unless one is manipulating the ~/.conda/environments.txt that Conda uses to track unnamed environments.

[Shriraj Hegde]

It shows up in the list, but doesn't have a name and requires full/relative path for activation