How to Install Conda Package to Google Colab With condacolab

What is Conda?

Conda is a popular open-source package management system that allows you to easily install, manage, and update packages and dependencies for your projects. It’s commonly used in data science and machine learning projects, as it provides an easy way to manage different versions of packages and dependencies. Conda is available on different platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.

What is Google Colab?

Google Colab is a cloud-based notebook environment that allows you to write and execute Python code in your browser. It’s based on Jupyter Notebook and provides a range of features, including access to powerful hardware resources, such as GPUs and TPUs. Google Colab is commonly used in data science and machine learning projects, as it provides an easy way to experiment with different algorithms and models.

Installing Conda to Google Colab

To install Conda to Google Colab, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Open a new Google Colab notebook

First, open a new Google Colab notebook by navigating to https://colab.research.google.com/ and clicking on “New Notebook”.

Step 2: Install Conda

Next, we need to install Conda to Google Colab. To do this, run the following commands in a new code cell:

!pip install -q condacolab
import condacolab
condacolab.install()

These commands will install the condacolab package, which provides an easy way to install Conda to Google Colab, and then install Conda itself.

Step 3: Verify Conda installation

Once the installation is complete, we can verify that Conda is installed correctly by running the following commands in a new code cell:

!conda --version

and it should print something like this if it is installed properly

conda 23.3.1

or

import condacolab
condacolab.check()

and it should print something like this

✨🍰✨ Everything looks OK!

Using Conda in Google Colab

To install packages to your Conda environment, run the following command in a new code cell:

!conda install pandas numpy matplotlib

This will install the packages “pandas”, “numpy”, and “matplotlib” to your Conda environment. You can replace these packages with any packages you want to install.

You can start using conda directly in your enviornment and interact with it like normal.

Cons

The Python kernel needs to be restarted for changes to be applied but it does that automatically. A message saying “Your session crashed for an unknown reason” will always appear for that reason so you can just ignore this message!

You can’t really create a new virtual enviornment. You can only use conda in the base enviornment. If you have an environment file, use conda env update -n base -f <your-file.yml>.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we utilized condacolab to install Conda to Google Colab, a popular cloud-based notebook environment used by data scientists and developers. Conda is a powerful package management system that allows you to easily install and manage different packages and dependencies for your projects. With Conda installed to Google Colab, you can take advantage of its features and enhance your productivity.

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