There are options to copy dependency names/urls/versions to files.
Recommendation
Normally it is safer to work from a new environment rather than changing root. However, consider backing up your existing environments before attempting changes. Verify the desired outcome by testing these commands in a demo environment. To backup your root env for example:
Docs on updated commands. With older conda versions use activate (Windows) and source activate (Linux/Mac OS). Newer versions of conda can use conda activate (this may require some setup with your shell configuration via conda init).
Note, this is likely an experimental feature, so this may not be appropriate in production until official adoption into the public API.
+Conda docs have changed since the original post; links updated.++Spec-files only work with environments created on the same OS. Unlike the first two options, spec-files only capture links to conda dependencies; pip dependencies are not included.
When setting up a new environment and I need the packages from the base environment in my new one (which is often the case) I am building in the prompt a identical conda environment by using a spec-file.txt with:
conda list --explicit > spec-file.txt
The spec-file includes the packages of for example the base environment.
Then using the prompt I install the the packages into the new environment:
conda create --name myenv --file spec-file.txt
The packages from base are then available in the new environment.
I also ran into the trouble of cloning an environment onto another machine and wanted to provide an answer. The key issue I had was addressing errors when the current environment contains development packages which cannot be obtained directly from conda install or pip install. For these cases I highly recommend conda-pack (see this answer):
pip install conda-pack
or,
conda install conda-pack
then back up the environment, to use the current environment just omit the my_env name,
# Pack environment my_env into my_env.tar.gz
$ conda pack -n my_env
# Pack environment my_env into out_name.tar.gz
$ conda pack -n my_env -o out_name.tar.gz
# Pack environment located at an explicit path into my_env.tar.gz
$ conda pack -p /explicit/path/to/my_env
and restoring,
# Unpack environment into directory `my_env`
$ mkdir -p my_env
$ tar -xzf my_env.tar.gz -C my_env
# Use Python without activating or fixing the prefixes. Most Python
# libraries will work fine, but things that require prefix cleanups
# will fail.
$ ./my_env/bin/python
# Activate the environment. This adds `my_env/bin` to your path
$ source my_env/bin/activate
# Run Python from in the environment
(my_env) $ python
# Cleanup prefixes from in the active environment.
# Note that this command can also be run without activating the environment
# as long as some version of Python is already installed on the machine.
(my_env) $ conda-unpack