Installation

mamba

Fresh install

We strongly recommend to start from mambaforge, a community project of the conda-forge community.

You can download mambaforge for Windows, macOS and Linux.

mambaforge comes with the popular conda-forge channel preconfigured, but you can modify the configuration to use any channel you like.

After successful installation, you can use the mamba commands as described in mamba user guide.

Existing conda install

If you are already a conda user, very good!

To get mamba, just install it into the base environment from the conda-forge channel:

conda install mamba -n base -c conda-forge

Warning

Installing mamba into any other environment than base can cause unexpected behavior

micromamba

micromamba is completely statically linked, which allows you to drop it in some place and just execute it.

Download and unzip the executable (from the official conda-forge package):

Linux

Ensure that basic utilities are installed. We need wget and tar with support for bzip2. Also you need a glibc based system like Ubuntu, Fedora or Centos (Alpine Linux does not work natively).

The following magic URL always returns the latest available version of micromamba, and the bin/micromamba part is automatically extracted using tar.

wget -qO- https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/linux-64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba

Note

Additional builds are available for linux-aarch64 (ARM64) and linux-ppc64le. Just modify linux-64 in the URL above to match the desired architecture.

After extraction is completed, we can use the micromamba binary.

If you want to quickly use micromamba in an ad-hoc usecase, you can run

export MAMBA_ROOT_PREFIX=/some/prefix  # optional, defaults to ~/micromamba
eval "$(./bin/micromamba shell hook -s posix)"

This shell hook modifies your shell variables to include the micromamba command.

If you want to persist these changes, you can automatically write them to your .bashrc (or .zshrc) by running ./micromamba shell init .... This also allows you to choose a custom MAMBA_ROOT_ENVIRONMENT, which is where the packages and repodata cache will live.

sh
./bin/micromamba shell init -s bash -p ~/micromamba  # this writes to your .bashrc file
# sourcing the bashrc file incorporates the changes into the running session.
# better yet, restart your terminal!
source ~/.bashrc

Now you can activate the base environment and install new packages, or create other environments.

micromamba activate  # this activates the base environment
micromamba install python=3.6 jupyter -c conda-forge
# or
micromamba create -n new_prefix xtensor -c conda-forge
micromamba activate new_prefix

OS X

micromamba has OS X support as well. Instructions are largely the same as linux:

curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/osx-64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba
mv bin/micromamba ./micromamba

# directly execute the hook
eval "$(./bin/micromamba shell hook -s posix)"

# ... or shell init
./micromamba shell init -s zsh -p ~/micromamba
source ~/.zshrc
micromamba activate
micromamba install python=3.6 jupyter -c conda-forge

Windows

micromamba also has Windows support! For Windows, we recommend powershell.

Below are the commands to get micromamba installed in PowerShell.

Invoke-Webrequest -URI https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/win-64/latest -OutFile micromamba.tar.bz2
C:\PROGRA~1\7-Zip\7z.exe x micromamba.tar.bz2 -aoa
C:\PROGRA~1\7-Zip\7z.exe x micromamba.tar -ttar -aoa -r Library\bin\micromamba.exe

MOVE -Force Library\bin\micromamba.exe micromamba.exe
.\micromamba.exe --help

# You can use e.g. $HOME\micromambaenv as your base prefix
$Env:MAMBA_ROOT_PREFIX="C:\Your\Root\Prefix"

# Invoke the hook
.\micromamba.exe shell hook -s powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression

# ... or initialize the shell
.\micromamba.exe shell init -s powershell -p C:\Your\Root\Prefix
# and use micromamba directly
micromamba create -f ./test/env_win.yaml -y
micromamba activate yourenv

Shell completion

For now, only micromamba provides shell completion on bash and zsh.

To activate it, it’s as simple as running:

micromamba shell completion

The completion is now available in any new shell opened or in the current shell after sourcing the configuration file to take modifications into account.

source ~/.<shell>rc

Just hit <TAB><TAB> to get completion when typing your command.

For example the following command will help you to pick a named environment to activate:

micromamba activate <TAB><TAB>