Installing Miniforge
Installing Miniforge
Anaconda and Miniconda, together with the main Anaconda repository ( defaults ), are no longer free for commercial
use - see Terms of Service. If you have these installed on your system, you must uninstall them.
An alternative is to use Miniforge, an open source project to provide the conda package manager using the conda-
forge channel for packages.
Running the uninstaller removes your installation including all path setup and configuration associated with it. It won't
remove your Python projects. You may need administrator rights to run it.
After running the uninstaller, check that your installation folder has been fully removed. Then reboot to ensure all
changes take effect.
Installing Miniforge
Miniforge is an open-source project that provides the conda package manager.
It does not come bundled with Spyder or other tools that come with Anaconda; these must be installed separately.
Download the correct installer from https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge. Most likely you want the latest
Windows x86_64 installer: Miniforge3-Windows-x86_64.exe
If you have difficulty downloading the executable, check here for a recent download:
https://aecom.sharepoint.com/sites/Python/Shared%20Documents/General
Double-click the installer to run it. When prompted to install for "Just Me" or "All Users" it's fine to choose "Just Me";
you won't need administrator rights for this.
You may like to set the install location to C:\Miniforge3 to make it easy to navigate to in future.
To check that you are only using the conda-forge channel and not defaults , open a Miniforge prompt and type:
channels:
- conda-forge
If the defaults channel is listed, use this command to set the channel to conda-forge :
An alternative is to directly edit the condarc file containing the defaults channel. You can do this in Notepad or any
plain text editor.
Installing packages
Unlike Anaconda, Miniforge does not come with many data science packages pre-installed. You can install these at the
Miniforge prompt, for example:
Managing environments
If you are using different Conda environments for your projects, ensure that these are deleted when you remove
Anaconda, or remove them yourself. You can then recreate them using Miniforge in the same way you would have
done with Anaconda.
If your environment is defined in a file (usually named environment.yml ) ensure that the file does not specify the
defaults channel.
Installing Spyder
Spyder is distributed under the MIT licence at the time of writing (June 2021). It can be installed using conda :
However, you are recommended to try PyCharm or Visual Studio Code both of which have excellent Python support.