How does one fix the issue of not writable paths with conda?

Question

Why do I see the following error when using conda (usually when installing packages or making new envs) and how do I fix it:

Verifying transaction: | WARNING cond         


        

Answer 1

if you are on Mac & have install Anaconda from GUI. try

change the permission of opt/anaconda3/ folder to Read & write.

This solved my problem.

Answer 2

reference: to https://gist.github.com/zoka123/f2b03f19924258d28441fe2d88750145

check if a path is writable:

if [ -w "./.conda" ]; then echo "WRITABLE"; else echo "NOT WRITABLE"; fi

if it is not writable, change writability to anybody:

chmod 775 ./.conda

If you are curious of existing file permission:

ls -lha outputs the set of access right of current locations, where d refers to current directory. Eg: drwxr-xr-x :

each digit refers to right for User, Group and Global respectively. For the above example, rwx means current user can read,write and execute; r-x for both group and global, which means they can read and execute only.

chmod is used with a 3-digit commands, each digit refers to one combination of the read, write, execute access for the above three types of identity.

755 means rwx for current user, and r-x for Group and Global.

You may refer to https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/tools/modify-file-permissions-with-chmod/ for reference.

Answer 3

To add user write permission to a directory recursively:

chmod -R u+w /Users/brandomiranda/.conda

Answer 4

I ran the top voted answer but because the chmod command did not have the recursive flag it did not work and later gave me problems (because I didn't change the permissions of EVERYTHING inside the conda folder of course):

So change permissions recursively of the directory with:

sudo chmod -R 775 /Users/brandomiranda/.conda

swap /Users/brandomiranda/ for your path to .conda of course.

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If you are worried about using sudo I believe its not that bad to have to run it because we are only changing the permissions of a very specific directory (which is much safer than say, running any conda command with sudo!)

The fact is, I don't know why the issue came despite me (I believe) installing conda properly with the conda .sh script as I outlined in the question. Solving that is the real solution I assume but I don't know how to solve that (I guess I could try re-installing yet again...)

Answer 5

As I said in the conda #7267 github issue, I had the same problem on Ubuntu because I installed Anaconda as a superuser: sudo bash Anaconda3-2019.10-Linux-x86_64.sh

[solution Ubuntu] remove Anaconda and install it without the superuser privileges:

sudo rm -rf ~/anaconda3
bash Anaconda3-2019.10-Linux-x86_64.sh

This fixed the problem.