Miniconda Folder size larger than regular Anaconda

17 views
Skip to first unread message

bryce...@gmail.com

unread,
Jan 24, 2016, 12:41:11 AM1/24/16
to Anaconda - Public
so I wanted to create a smaller Miniconda, install that i could stick on my school homedrive with a script i could fire off that would set up my environment variables and paths and such. However when i tried copying the full anaconda folder it was 1.8 Gb. and that's not gonna happen!

however after creating a miniconda install and grabbing the basic scipy stack packages (numpy, scipy, pandas matplotlib, sympy, jupyter, sci-kit-image & learn) the folder size for Miniconda was over 1.9 Gb. what gives?

i was looking a the pkgs folder and this seemed like maybe its a download folder? it alone was about a Gig in my Miniconda folder versus about 560 Mb in my regular Anaconda folder. Can this be cleared out?

Ilan Schnell

unread,
Jan 24, 2016, 12:47:53 PM1/24/16
to Anaconda
I have no clue what exactly you did.  Which OS are you on?  Which commands did you execute?
Could it be that you installed Miniconda into an existing Anaconda installation?

--
Anaconda Community Support Group Brought to you by Continuum Analytics
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Anaconda - Public" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to anaconda+u...@continuum.io.
To post to this group, send email to anac...@continuum.io.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/a/continuum.io/group/anaconda/.

bryce...@gmail.com

unread,
Jan 24, 2016, 9:12:04 PM1/24/16
to Anaconda - Public, bryce...@gmail.com
Sorry it was late when i made the first post :(

I was doing a separate install from my normal full anaconda install. I am on windows 7 64bit.

I downloaded the Miniconda installer and installed to a separate folder outside of my base anaconda install.

then i used the conda command(making sure i was using the conda from the Miniconda folder) to install the other packages.
so 

C:\Users\me\Minconda2> conda install scipy matplotlib pandas seaborn sympy scikit-learn scikit-image



the resulting Miniconda2 folder size was 1.9 Gb, about 100 Mb larger than my regular Anaconda2 folder.

within my Anaconda2 and Miniconda2 driectory is a folder called pkgs. it looks like this is where conda downloads packages to install from? so there are a bunch of bz2 files and then what seems to be the uncompressed versions of these.

I am thinking since regular anaconda comes with all the packages already the pkgs folder should be pretty empty, however if using conda install with miniconda every package you install is cached in the pkgs folder.
is it safe to clear this out?

My main goal is to create a portable anaconda install that wont kill the space on my student drive. I could use a usb drive but things load from the drive faster than a usb key.

Ilan Schnell

unread,
Jan 24, 2016, 9:18:15 PM1/24/16
to Anaconda, bryce...@gmail.com
The "pkgs" directory is only used for the initial downloading an extraction of packages.  You can remove the "pkgs" directory completely, and everything will still work.

- Ilan

--

Ian Stokes Rees

unread,
Jan 24, 2016, 10:05:02 PM1/24/16
to anac...@continuum.io
On 1/24/16 9:18 PM, Ilan Schnell wrote:
The "pkgs" directory is only used for the initial downloading an extraction of packages.  You can remove the "pkgs" directory completely, and everything will still work.

While it is certainly the case that conda packages are constructed to be relocatable once they are "installed" they are not, in general, relocatable via a "cp" or "mv" command on Unix-based operating systems (Linux and OS X).  The situation may be different for Windows.

Let us know how this goes for you.

bryce...@gmail.com

unread,
Jan 28, 2016, 10:45:56 AM1/28/16
to Anaconda - Public
It seems to have worked!
 I was able to run the jupyter notebook and run numpy, & matplotlib ok. I just had to pre-pend the anaconda_root, anaconda_root/scripts & anaconda_root/Library/bin directories to my path and set my homedrive as my HOME and USERPROFILE environment variables.

I will note that I installed on windows 7 at home and then running anaconda on windows 7 machine at school. probably no guarantees if windows versions were different.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages