Changing where conda stores files on Blanca

[mdpiper]

When I tried to create a conda environment today on Blanca, I hit the 2 GB home directory disk quota, and it failed! To work around this problem, I instead used my project directory, which has a 250 GB quota, to create the conda environment. To do this, I modified two conda settings.

Before I did this, though, I cleared out the existing conda files in my home directory by running conda clean:

conda clean --all

answering "yes" to all the prompts.

The two conda settings I changed are the locations of pkgs_dirs and envs_dirs. Use conda config to add new locations in your project directory for these directories:

conda config --prepend envs_dirs /projects/USER/.conda/envs
conda config --prepend pkgs_dirs /projects/USER/.conda/pkgs

substituting your username on Blanca for USER in these statements.

Check the result by looking at the output from conda info:

conda info

You should see the updated paths in the "package cache" and "envs directories" entries.

This worked for me--when I created a new environment, it and all the packages used to build it were placed in my project directory instead of my home directory.