Just came across this post about specifying parameters on conda Basically, when you create an enter a new environment, this gives you the capability to save environmental variables specific to that environment. And even better, you can deconstruct those variables once you leave that environment. What does this mean? It means that you can enforce relatively isolated environments, when it comes to environments. So if you wanted to install 2 different versions of the same package in two different environments, easy! Just specify the path variables that you want under the activate.d file, and restore the variables that you had previously in the deactivate.d file. To see what I mean, consider the following test conda create -n test pip source activate test Now we have a new conda environment, and if you check out your miniconda envs folder you should be able to see it. For me, I can run the following to do this ls ~/miniconda3/envs/ I'm using miniconda instead bec