Installing Anaconda into a Virtual Environment

Question

I've currently got a working installation of the Enthought Python Distribution on my machine that I don't want to necessarily disrupt, but I'd like to look at moving over to Anaconda from Continuum.

I can easily install Anaconda into the virtualenv directory I create, but I'm not sure how to tell that virtualenv to use the anaconda-version of Python. If I was telling my whole system to use it I can alter .bash_profile with something like export PATH="/DIRECTORIES/anaconda/bin:$PATH. Is there a way to do that within a virtualenv?

Answer 1

When you create your virtualenv use the -p flag to give it the path to the Python executable you want to use:

virtualenv -p /path/to/python-anaconda-version

Answer 2

I just tested the Anaconde 1.6 installer from http://continuum.io/downloads

After downloading, I did:

bash Anaconda-1.6.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

If you take the defaults, you'll end up with a directory anaconda in your home directory, completely separate from your EPD or system Python installation.

To activate the anaconda installation's default environment, do the following:

source $HOME/anaconda/bin/activate ~/anaconda

All Python commands will now come from the default Anaconda environment in $HOME/anaconda, which is itself a kind of a virtual environment. You can create sub-environments with e.g. conda create -n myenv1 ipython scipy, but this is not necessary.

As a side note, you can also use pip (also in $HOME/anaconda/bin) to install PyPI packages into your Anaconda default environment (it has pip installed by default) or any of the sub-environments (in which case you should first install pip into the sub-environment using conda install -n myenv1 pip).

It is possible to install parts of Anaconda manually into an existing virtualenv, but using their installer is by far the easiest way to test and use, without affecting any of your existing Python installations.