Keep conda environment of parent bash session when start a new bash session

Question

Suppose my current activated conda environment is py314 on Linux. When I start a new bash environment from the current one, no matter via command bash, screen, or start vscode from command line, the new bash terminal will be set back to base again.

I hope that the conda environment in new bash session should be the same as its parent's, so that I don't have to manually change it to the right one every time.

This is extremely annoy when using with vscode and copilot, as copilot will execute command in terminal and the wrong conda env will lead to unexpected errors.

link89 · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-28 01:26:57Z

It turns out that whenever a new bash environment is started, the .bashrc or .bash_profile will be executed and force conda env to base.

To fix this, I just keep the current CONDA_PREFIX before running conda init procedure, and recovery the environment after the init procedure is done.

__conda_current_env=$CONDA_PREFIX
# >>> conda initialize >>>
# !! Contents within this block are managed by 'conda init' !!
__conda_setup="$('/home/henry/anaconda3/bin/conda' 'shell.bash' 'hook' 2> /dev/null)"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    eval "$__conda_setup"
else
    if [ -f "/home/henry/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh" ]; then
        . "/home/henry/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh"
    else
        export PATH="/home/henry/anaconda3/bin:$PATH"
    fi
fi
unset __conda_setup
# <<< conda initialize <<<
[ -n "$__conda_current_env" ] && conda activate $__conda_current_env
unset __conda_current_env

Diego Torres Milano · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-28 06:26:57Z

0

If you don't want bash to read the rc files when is started from command line just run

bash --norc

answered yesterday

Diego Torres Milano

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2 Comments

link89 yesterday

It won't work for bash started by screen, tmux or vscode.

pmf yesterday

You can tell at least screen and tmux (I don't know vscode) what default shell to run, bash --norc in this case.

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