Removing Conda environment

Question

I want to remove a certain environment created with conda. How can I achieve that? Let's say I have an active testenv environment. I tried, by following documentation, with:

$ conda env remove

CondaEnvironmentError: cannot remove current environment. deactivate and run conda remove again

I then deactivate it:

$ source deactivate

I try running again the command to remove it and I still get the same error. What is going wrong here?

Answer 1

You probably didn't fully deactivate the Conda environment - remember, the command you need to use with Conda is conda deactivate (for older versions, use source deactivate). So it may be wise to start a new shell and activate the environment in that before you try. Then deactivate it.

You can use the command

conda env remove -n ENV_NAME

to remove the environment with that name. (--name is equivalent to -n)

Note that you can also place environments anywhere you want using -p /path/to/env instead of -n ENV_NAME when both creating and deleting environments, if you choose. They don't have to live in your conda installation.

UPDATE, 30 Jan 2019: From Conda 4.6 onwards the conda activate command becomes the new official way to activate an environment across all platforms. The changes are described in this Anaconda blog post