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 a tiny version of the mamba package manager. It is a pure C++ package with a separate command line interface. It is very tiny, does not need a base environment and does not come with a default version of Python. It is completely statically linked, which allows you to drop it in some place and just execute it. It can be used to bootstrap environments (as an alternative to miniconda).

Note: micromamba is currently experimental and it’s advised to use it in containers & CI only.

Automatic installation

Homebrew

On macOS, you can install micromamba from Homebrew:

brew install --cask micromamba

Install script

If you are using macOS or Linux, there is a simple way of installing micromamba. Simply execute the installation script in your preferred shell.

For Linux, the default shell is bash:

curl micro.mamba.pm/install.sh | bash

For macOS, the default shell is zsh:

curl micro.mamba.pm/install.sh | zsh

Manual installation

Linux and macOS

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

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.

# Linux Intel (x86_64):
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/linux-64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba
# Linux ARM64:
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/linux-aarch64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba
# Linux Power:
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/linux-ppc64le/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba
# macOS Intel (x86_64):
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/osx-64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba
# macOS Silicon/M1 (ARM64):
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/osx-arm64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba

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.

# Linux/bash:
./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

# macOS/zsh:
./micromamba shell init -s zsh -p ~/micromamba
source ~/.zshrc

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 env_name xtensor -c conda-forge
micromamba activate env_name

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

Nightly builds

You can download fully statically linked builds for each commit to master on GitHub (scroll to the bottom of the “Summary” page): https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba/actions/workflows/static_build.yml?query=is%3Asuccess

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>

API

We should soon figure out an automated process to use the latest version of micromamba. We can use the anaconda api: https://api.anaconda.org/release/conda-forge/micromamba/latest to find all the latest packages, we just need to select the one for the right platform.