RemoveError: 'setuptools' is a dependency of conda and cannot be removed from conda's operating environment

Question

I have Win 10

When running:

conda update conda

I encountered this error:

RemoveError: \'setuptools\' is a dependenc         


        

Answer 1

I ran into this issue in a Dockerfile using continuumio/miniconda3:latest in which I had the line:

RUN conda update -n base -c defaults conda

To fix it, I simply appended the setuptools requirement:

RUN conda update -n base -c defaults conda setuptools

There was no need for any other heroics.

Answer 2

I am on a Mac rather than Windows but I was getting the same message. I was able to update by running conda update setuptools. It brought conda up-to-date in the process.

Answer 3

While I still did not find how to cleanly uninstall anaconda, I was able to resolve the error by using the following:

conda update --force conda
conda update anaconda

and again

conda update conda

As a result, I got a stable environment with no dependency conflicts. Seems like something within latest conda is too restrictive and update must be forced.

Answer 4

I'm on Linux Ubuntu 16.04, and it works for me by:

conda uninstall setuptools
# This is a must to make it work
conda install setuptools
conda update --force conda

Answer 5

I was having trouble installing scrapy with anaconda using ' conda install -c conda-forge scrapy'

I kept getting the

'Verifying transaction: failed' ' RemoveError: 'setuptools' is a dependency of conda and cannot be removed from conda's operating environment.'

error so I tried the mentioned above force install of setup "conda update --force conda" and once that was successful I was able to reapply the scrapy install successfully.