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How to create an x64 (Intel) conda environment on your Apple Silicon Mac (ARM) conda install

Note: This blog post has been updated with a new command for creating an osx-64 environment, after I was contacted by someone from Anaconda telling me a newer, easier way to do this

I came across some conda packages that didn’t work properly on my M1 Mac (Apple Silicon – ARM processor) the other day. They installed fine, but gave segmentation faults when run. So, I wanted to run the x64 (Intel) versions of these packages instead.

I haven’t actually needed to do this since I got a M1 Mac (a testament to the quality and range of ARM conda packages available these days through conda-forge), so I wasn’t sure how to do it.

A bit of Googling and experimenting led to this nice simple set of instructions. The upshot of this is you don’t need to install another version of Anaconda/miniconda/etc – you can just create a x64 environment in your existing conda install.

So:

1. Run

   conda create --platform osx-64 --name environment_name python 

   In the past you used to have to prepend a CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-64 chunk to set an environment variable, but since conda 23.10.0 (released on 30th October 2023) you can use the --platform parameter instead. This tells conda to use the osx-64 packages from the package server, rather than the default osx-arm64 (M1 Mac) subdirectory. This is what gets you the x64 packages. Documentation for this option is available here, along with a list of possible platform names you can use.

2. When this command finishes, you will have a new x64 conda environment. You can then activate it with

   conda activate environment_name

3. That’s it! You now have a x64 environment which you can install packages in using standard conda install commands.

Note:
The previous set of instructions here had two extra steps to deal with the CONDA_SUBDIR environment variable. I’ve included these below for anyone using an old version of conda, but these won’t be needed if you’re using the --platform parameter:

3. Now we need to tell conda to always use this CONDA_SUBDIR setting when using this environment, otherwise any future installs in this environment will use the default CONDA_SUBDIR and things will get very confused. We can do this by setting a conda environment config setting to tell conda to set a specific environment variable when you activate the environment. Do this by running:

   conda env config vars set CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-64

4. The output of that command will warn you to deactivate and reactivate the environment, so do this

   conda deactivate
   conda activate your_environment_name

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This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.

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Categorised as: Computing, How To, Programming, Python