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Building with your organization’s channels ensures that your project’s software always complies with security standards.

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Anaconda channels

Anaconda hosts several channels that connect to our premium, curated and provide you with thousands of the most popular data science platform software packages available on the open source market today.
  • main: The default channel for Anaconda. It contains the most popular packages from the Anaconda repository.
  • main-x Beta: A new authenticated Anaconda channel containing ~6,000 new conda packages built by Anaconda. It is meant to be used alongside main.
  • r Deprecated: Provides packages built for the R programming language.
  • msys2: Provides packages built for Windows.

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Adding a channel to your .condarc file

In order to access packages from your organization’s channels, you must configure your .condarc file to tell conda where the channel is located. Complete the following steps to add one of your organizations’ channels to your .condarc file:
  1. Select Channels from the left-hand navigation.
  2. Select Copy channel path.
    Copy channel path button
  3. Open Anaconda Prompt (Terminal on macOS/Linux) and run the following command: 
    conda config --prepend channels <CHANNEL_PATH>
    This adds the specified channel to the top of your channels: list, giving it top priority when conda is searching for packages. For more information about channel priority and additional conda config command arguments, see Channels.
    Example .condarc file
    channel_settings:
  - channel: https://repo.anaconda.cloud/*
    auth: anaconda-auth
channels:
  - https://repo.anaconda.cloud/repo/<ORG_ID>/<CHANNEL_NAME>
  - defaults
add_anaconda_token: true
default_channels:
  - https://repo.anaconda.cloud/repo/main
    If you want to use your organizations’ channels exclusively, make sure that they are the only channels present in your .condarc’s channels: list.

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Removing a channel from your .condarc file

To remove a channel from your channels: list, open Anaconda Prompt (Terminal on macOS/Linux) and run the following command: 
conda config --remove channels <CHANNEL>
For example, if you don’t want to pull from the default channels, you can run the following command: 
conda config --remove channels defaults
This will leave the channels listed under default_channels: in the .condarc file for later use, if needed, but won’t look for packages in those locations.
You can add the default channels to your .condarc file’s channels: list at any time by running the command: conda config --append channels defaults

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Viewing channel details

From the Channels page, select any channel to view its details. You can also explore the channel’s packages from this page. The channel details page provides the following information about the channel:
  • The channel’s address (the URL you add to your .condarc file to access the channel’s packages)
  • General information about the channel
  • Information about the policy that is applied to the channel
Channel details page