Moving the default environment and package directories

By default, conda stores both its environment directory (variable envs_dirs) and its package directory (variable pkgs_dirs) in your home directory: ~/.conda. As noted above, these directories can begin to take up a substantial amount of space as you continue to work with conda environments.

One solution is to move both of these directories to a partition where you have enough space. For this example, let's assume that you've chosen to store both of these directories within /nevis/olga/data/jsmith/conda (again, this is not a directory that actually exists on any of the Nevis Linux cluster systems).

# Define a handy variable for this operation
prefix=/nevis/olga/data/jsmith/conda

# Add the new definitions to ~/.condarc
conda config --add envs_dirs ${prefix}/envs
conda config --add pkgs_dirs ${prefix}/pkgs

# Move the package directory to the new location
# (To move the environments, use the clone recipe above)
(cd ~/.conda; tar -cf - ./pkgs) | (cd ${prefix}; tar -xf -)

# Delete the old package directory
rm -rf ~/.conda/pkgs

Any new conda environments that you create will be in the directory given by envs_dirs.