Sharing environments

Saving an environment is a good practice. The generated backup file is really light and will allow you to share the environmnet with collaborators or easily re-use the same environment on another computer.

Depending the way you saved your environment i.e:

conda env export > environment.yml
conda env export --from-history > environment.yml
conda env export --no-builds > environment.yml

you will have a channels section on top:

channels:
- conda-forge
- bioconda

The information hold by the channels section have priority over the channels configured in your local conda configuration file (.condarc). When building an environement from this file, if a package is not found among the listed channels, then the channels defined in your local conda configuration (.condarc) will be used.

When sharing the file with someone else, if this person did not deactivate the defaults channel in its local conda configuration, she/he may use anaconda licensed defaults channel.

To avoid this issue you should add the - nodefaults channel in the channelssection of your saved yaml environment, which will deactivate the defaults channel from the local conda configuration (.condarc) of the computer using it.

For more details, see the relevant conda docs.