How to install 2 Anacondas (Python 2 and 3) on Mac OS
I'm relatively new in Mac OS. I've just installed XCode (for c++ compiler) and Anaconda with the latest Python 3 (for myself). Now I'm wondering how to install properly second Anaconda (for work) with Python 2?
I need both versions to work with iPython and Spyder IDE. Ideal way is to have totally separate Python environments. For example, I wish I could write like conda install scikit-learn for Python 3 environment and something like conda2 install scikit-learn for Python 2.
Answer
There is no need to install Anaconda again. Conda, the package manager for Anaconda, fully supports separated environments. The easiest way to create an environment for Python 2.7 is to do
conda create -n python2 python=2.7 anaconda
This will create an environment named python2 that contains the Python 2.7 version of Anaconda. You can activate this environment with
source activate python2
This will put that environment (typically ~/anaconda/envs/python2) in front in your PATH, so that when you type python at the terminal it will load the Python from that environment.
If you don't want all of Anaconda, you can replace anaconda in the command above with whatever packages you want. You can use conda to install packages in that environment later, either by using the -n python2 flag to conda, or by activating the environment.