How to Disable Conda Auto-Activation

Conda is a nice way to manage Python environments and packages. A lot of bioinformatics software can be installed through conda, and some even (sort of) require it.

If you need conda for some things, but don’t use it every day, it can be nice to have it not auto-activate every time you open the shell.

Conda has an option for this:

conda config --set auto_activate false

Now when you need conda you can manually activate it:

conda activate base

And deactivate it when you’re through:

conda deactivate

That’s nice.

By the way, you can check out the effect of the config command by looking at your conda config file, e.g., ~/.condarc. You should see something like this in there.

auto_activate: false

Note: There will be some conda init stuff in your shell config (e.g., ~/.bashrc, ~/.config/fish/config.fish), but it’s not a big deal to leave that as is.