The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully

Question

I tried to update or install new packages from anaconda and lately, this message has appeared:

The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan         


        

Answer 1

The command conda install -c anaconda anaconda did the trick for me. For my setup, I need to specify the channel otherwise it would not work. After running the command in the terminal, I was prompted to update a list of packages that was found to be inconsistent. Without this step, I was not able to install or update any packages with conda install <package_name> or conda update <package_name respectively.

Answer 2

What worked for me was to conda remove <offending_packagename>, conda update --all and then finally conda install <offending_packagename>.

Answer 3

If the other solutions don't work, reverting the environment can fix this.

Use conda list --revisions, pick a revision number, and use conda install --revision [#] going back step-by-step until everything works again.

Answer 4

Given a situation like the following,

> conda update -c intel --all
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: |
The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully
The following packages are causing the inconsistency:

  - intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
  - intel/win-64::prompt_toolkit==1.0.15=py36_2
done

As mentioned in other answers, the idea is to have some sort of re-installation to occur for the inconsistent packages.

Thus, with a few copy-&-paste's, you could:

> conda install intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: /
The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully
The following packages are causing the inconsistency:

  - intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
  - intel/win-64::prompt_toolkit==1.0.15=py36_2
done

## Package Plan ##

  environment location: c:\conda

  added / updated specs:
    - ipython


The following NEW packages will be INSTALLED:

  jedi               intel/win-64::jedi-0.12.0-py36_2
  parso              intel/win-64::parso-0.2.0-py36_2
  pygments           intel/win-64::pygments-2.2.0-py36_5
  wcwidth            intel/win-64::wcwidth-0.1.7-py36_6


Proceed ([y]/n)? y

Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: done
Executing transaction: done

(and you would have to repeat for all the packages)

---

My “Shortcut”

Alternatively, cook up an (ugly) one-liner (this should work for Windows as well as other platforms)

Note: by "ORIGINAL_COMMAND", I'm referring to any command that gives you the error message (without any other side-effects, ideally)

<ORIGINAL_COMMAND> 2>&1 | python -c "import sys,re,conda.cli; conda.cli.main('conda','install','-y',*re.findall(r'^\s*-\s*(\S+)$',sys.stdin.read(),re.MULTILINE))"

Expanding the above one-liner:

from re import findall, MULTILINE
from sys import stdin
from conda.cli import main

main(
    "conda", "install", "-y",
    "--force",  # Maybe add a '--force'/'--force-reinstall' (I didn't add it for the one-liner above)
    *findall(r"^\s*-\s*(\S+)$", stdin.read(), MULTILINE)  # Here are the offenders
)

Answer 5

I had faced the same problem. Simply running

conda install anaconda

solved the problem for me.

Answer 6

saw this on Google Groups

This message was added in conda 4.6.9, previously there was no indication when conda detected an inconsistent environment unless conda was run in debug mode. It is likely that your environment was inconsistent for some time but the upgrade to conda made it visible. The best option it to run "conda install package_name" for the inconsistent packages to let conda try to restore consistency.

and it really works for me.

Maybe you should try conda install anaconda in your situation.