It is tricky to use pip in a conda environment

conda_pip_usage.md

Using pip and conda together can break things

• According to this blog from Anaconda, it is tricky to use pip in a conda environment.
• The main subtleness comes conda's limited abilities to control packages installed by pip or other package managers.

Best Practices Checklist

Use conda environments for isolation

• create a conda environment to isolate any changes pip makes
• environments take up little space thanks to hard links
• care should be taken to avoid running pip in the 'root' environment

Use pip only after conda

• install as many requirements as possible with conda, then use pip
• pip should be run with –upgrade-strategy only-if-needed (the default)
• Do not use pip with the –user argument, avoid all 'users' installs

Recreate the environment if changes are needed

• once pip has been used conda will be unaware of the changes
• to install additional conda packages it is best to recreate the environment

Store conda and pip requirements in text files

• package requirements can be passed to conda via the –file argument
• pip accepts a list of Python packages with -r or –requirements
• conda env will export or create environments based on a file with conda and pip requirements