Using mamba solver with conda

How to use the mamba solver with conda without installing mamba

Installing packages with anaconda/conda can be a slow and painful process, partly due to its default solver. Mamba solves this problem but it needs to be installed separately. However installing mamba is not always possible, particularly in HPC environments where you don’t have the requisite rights.

The conda-libmamba-solver package provides an elegant solution by allowing us to use the libmamba solver that is used by mamba directly in conda.

Installation

The official documentation suggests that conda-libmamba-solver be installed on the base environment. But in my case, I didn’t have the rights to update the base environment. Therefore I ended up installing it on the environment where I’ll be using this solver.

(ipm) ~> conda install conda-libmamba-solver

Once installed, you can now specify libmamba as the solver when installing packages. While the official docs don’t mention this, but I also had to specify the conda-forge channel.

(ipm) ~> conda install geopandas --solver=libmamba --channel=conda-forge

Setting as default

To enable the above settings permanently, you can add them to the .condarc file as follows:

(ipm) ~> conda config --set solver libmamba
(ipm) ~> conda config --add channels conda-forge

Now you should be able to install packages using libmamba from the conda-forge channel by default.

(ipm) ~> conda install sortedcontainers