How do I find the name of the conda environment in which my code is running?

Question

I\'m looking for a good way to figure out the name of the conda environment I\'m in from within running code or an interactive python instance.

The use-case is that

Answer 1

Edit: Oops, I hadn't noticed Ivo's answer. Let's say that I am expanding a little bit on it.

---

If you run your python script from terminal:

import os
os.system("conda env list")

This will list all conda environments, as from terminal with conda env list.

Slightly better:

import os
_ = os.system("conda env list | grep '*'")

The _ = bit will silence the exist status of the call to os.system (0 if successful), and grep will only print out the line with the activated conda environment.

If you don't run your script from terminal (e.g. it is scheduled via crontab), then the above won't have anywhere to "print" the result. Instead, you need to use something like python's subprocess module. The simplest solution is probably to run:

import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output("conda env list | grep '*'", shell=True, encoding='utf-8')
print(output)

Namely output is a string containing the output of the command conda env list, not its exit status (that too can be retrieved, see documentation of the subprocess module).

Now that you have a string with the information on the activated conda environment, you can perform whichever test you need (using regular expressions) to perform (or not) the installs mentioned in your question.

Remark.
Of course, print(output) in the block above will have no effect if your script is not run from terminal, but if you test the block in a script which you run from terminal, then you can verify that it gives you what you want. You can for instance print this information into a log file (using the logging module is recommended).