How to set up a conda osx-64 environment on ARM mac?

Question

I have an M1 MacBook using conda through miniforge3.

I want to use some packages not built for ARM (ifcopenshell, pythonocc-core). Mixing channels (conda-forge/osx-64 and conda-forge/osx-arm) often does not work reliably.

How do I tell conda/mamba to have an environment only using x64? I don't want to install osx-64 conda in parallel.

Answer 1

  conda create -n intel_env
  conda activate intel_env
  conda config --env --set subdir osx-64
  conda install python

Or

  CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-64 conda create -n intel_env python
  conda activate intel_env
  conda config --env --set subdir osx-64

Answer 2

Using micromamba it's as simple as adding --platform osx-64 to every invocation of micromamba:

micromamba create -n intel_env --platform osx-64 python

Micromamba is an alternative conda-env manager, supporting most conda commands with some slight differences. It's what's powering mamba v1 under the hood.