conda-protect 🔐

Protect conda environments to avoid mistakenly modifying them.

In conda, it's sometimes nice to set certain environments as "off-limits". This can especially be true for the base environment. This plugin that allows you to protect arbitrary environments, and it will cause conda to exit early on the following commands if an environment is protected:

• install
• create
• update
• remove
• env remove
• env update (still not fully supported)

Install

You can install this plugin by running the following command:

conda install -c conda-forge conda-protect

Usage

Conda protect installs several new subcommands for conda: one for protecting environments protect and one for listing guarded environments plist. These commands are explained in further detail below:

Protecting environments

To guard an environment, run the protect subcommand:

$ conda protect base
base is 🔐 protected

Now, when you try to run a command against this environment, conda will exit early:

$ conda install -n base python

CondaProtectError: Environment "base" is currently protected. Run `conda protect 'base'` to remove protection.

If you want to remove a protection to add/modify anything, just run the protect subcommand again:

$ conda protect base
base is unprotected 🔓

Listing environments and showing protection status

Conda protect also installs a plist subcommand that comes in handy when you've forgotten which environments are protected:

$ conda protect --list
                        Conda Environments
┏━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name      ┃ Prefix                                ┃ Status       ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ -         │ /tmp/user1-test-env-one               │ 🔐 protected │
│ base      │ /home/user1/opt/conda/                │ 🔐 protected │
│ test_env1 │ /home/user1/opt/conda/envs/test_env1  │ 🔐 protected │
│ test_env2 │ /home/user1/opt/conda/envs/test_env2  │              │
│ test_env3 │ /home/user1/opt/conda/envs/test_env3  │              │
└───────────┴───────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────┘

You can also list just the protected environments with the --protected option:

$ conda protect --list --protected
                        Conda Environments
┏━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name      ┃ Prefix                                ┃ Status       ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ -         │ /tmp/user1-test-env-one               │ 🔐 protected │
│ base      │ /home/user1/opt/conda/                │ 🔐 protected │
│ test_env1 │ /home/user1/opt/conda/envs/test_env1  │ 🔐 protected │
└───────────┴───────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────┘