Updating the base environment

conda is used from the command line. The command line is a text interface for your computer. It’s a program that takes in commands, which it passes on to the computer’s operating system to run.

• Windows users should open the Miniforge prompt (search in the start menu)

• macOS and linux users open a shell (Konsole or terminal)

You should now have a window showing the following text (or similar):

(base) username@computer:~$

Especially the (base) part is required. If this is not present try to open the command line again.

Note

There are several names for a command line interface, such as Terminal, Konsole, (or Console), Shell, Prompt. In the context of this course they all mean the same.

The base environment

The base environment contains conda itself and some other packages. We do not conduct our project in base but will create a dedicated environment for this.

We can update the base environment by typing the following command:

conda update --all

If any changes are suggested confirm the update with y and it will install the newest version of all packages.

For out course we need to install two additional packages into the base environment:

conda install jupyterlab nb_conda_kernels

again confirm the dialog with y. Once this runs successfully we have installed the required addition packages into the base environment: jupyterlab and nb_conda_kernels (and its dependencies). We will mostly use jupyter lab to run python code - this will be discussed in the Running Python exercise.