Useful BASH shortcuts for conda

Anaconda’s conda has become the de facto environment management tool in Python-oriented scientific computing. Its lightweight environments are suitable for development and, at least in some cases, deployment. In general, for each new project, I like to create a new environment. Creating a new, mostly empty environment is done with the following command:

$ conda env create -y -n my-project-name

Then the new environment must be activated with

$ conda activate my-project-name

If I later want to remove the environment:

$ conda env remove -y -n my-project-name

This can get tiresome, so I have the following functions defined in my .bashrc:

function conact() {
    conda activate $(basename $(pwd))
}

function cenv() {
    if [ -f environment.yaml ]; then
    conda env create --file=environment.yaml -n $(basename $(pwd))
    else
    conda create -yn $(basename $(pwd))
    fi
}

function rmcenv() {
    conda remove -n $(basename $(pwd)) --all
}

Now when starting a new project, I need only type

$ cenv
$ conact