I recently started over with a fresh development environment and decided to try something new: I’m using Python 3 via miniconda. The first real hiccup I’ve run into is that conda’s environment activation/deactivation scheme only works in bash or zsh. I use fish. There is an open PR to get fish support for conda but in the meantime I hacked something together to help me out.

"Activating" a conda environment does a couple of things:

• Puts the environment’s "bin" directory at the front of the PATH environment variable.
• Sets a CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV environment variable that tells conda in which environment to do things when none is specified.
• Adds the environment name to the prompt ala virtualenv.

Deactivating the environment resets everything to its pre-activation state. The fish functions I put together work like this:

~ > type python
python is /Users/---/miniconda3/bin/python
~ > condactivate env-name
(env-name) ~ > type python
python is /Users/---/miniconda3/envs/env-name/bin/python
(env-name) ~ > deactivate
~ > type python
python is /Users/---/miniconda3/bin/python

Here’s the text of the functions:

To use these, add them to the ~/.config/fish/ directory and source them from the end of the ~/.config/fish/config.fish file:

source $HOME/.config/fish/conda.fish