I'm trying to use miniconda3 to install pdfplumber. I keep getting this error message and I don't know how to interpret it.
(env1) C:\Users\engineer>conda install -c conda-forge pdfplumber
Collecting package metadata (current_repodata.json): done
Solving environment: failed with initial frozen solve. Retrying with flexible solve.
Solving environment: failed with repodata from current_repodata.json, will retry with next repodata source.
Collecting package metadata (repodata.json): done
Solving environment: failed with initial frozen solve. Retrying with flexible solve.
Solving environment: -
Found conflicts! Looking for incompatible packages.
This can take several minutes. Press CTRL-C to abort.
failed
UnsatisfiableError: The following specifications were found to be incompatible with each other:
Output in format: Requested package -> Available versions
Note that strict channel priority may have removed packages required for satisfiability.
Also:
(env1) C:\Users\engineer>conda info
active environment : env1
active env location : C:\tools\miniconda3\envs\env1
shell level : 2
user config file : C:\Users\engineer\.condarc populated config files : C:\Users\engineer\.condarc
conda version : 4.10.3
conda-build version : not installed
python version : 3.8.10.final.0
virtual packages : __cuda=10.2=0
__win=0=0
__archspec=1=x86_64
base environment : C:\tools\miniconda3 (writable)
conda av data dir : C:\tools\miniconda3\etc\conda conda av metadata url : None
channel URLs : https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/win-64
https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/noarch
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/win-64
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/noarch
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/win-64
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/noarch
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/msys2/win-64
https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/msys2/noarch
package cache : C:\tools\miniconda3\pkgs
C:\Users\engineer\.conda\pkgs
C:\Users\engineer\AppData\Local\conda\conda\pkgs
envs directories : C:\tools\miniconda3\envs
C:\Users\engineer\.conda\envs
C:\Users\engineer\AppData\Local\conda\conda\envs
platform : win-64
user-agent : conda/4.10.3 requests/2.26.0 CPython/3.8.10 Windows/10 Windows/10.0.18363
administrator : False
netrc file : None
offline mode : False
Using pip is not an option as it absolutely will not work behind my corporate proxy whereas miniconda3 will.
Another case of Conda being terrible at identifying unsatisfiability issues. Mamba does just fine with this, identifying that the imagemagick package is not available for the win-64 platform:
$ CONDA_SUBDIR="win-64" mamba create -dn foo -c conda-forge pdfplumber
__ __ __ __
/ \ / \ / \ / \
/ \/ \/ \/ \
███████████████/ /██/ /██/ /██/ /████████████████████████
/ / \ / \ / \ / \ \____
/ / \_/ \_/ \_/ \ o \__,
/ _/ \_____/ `
|/
███╗ ███╗ █████╗ ███╗ ███╗██████╗ █████╗
████╗ ████║██╔══██╗████╗ ████║██╔══██╗██╔══██╗
██╔████╔██║███████║██╔████╔██║██████╔╝███████║
██║╚██╔╝██║██╔══██║██║╚██╔╝██║██╔══██╗██╔══██║
██║ ╚═╝ ██║██║ ██║██║ ╚═╝ ██║██████╔╝██║ ██║
╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═════╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝
mamba (0.15.2) supported by @QuantStack
GitHub: https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba
Twitter: https://twitter.com/QuantStack
█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
Looking for: ['pdfplumber']
bioconda/win-64 [====================] (00m:00s) No change
pkgs/main/noarch [====================] (00m:00s) Done
pkgs/r/win-64 [====================] (00m:00s) Done
pkgs/r/noarch [====================] (00m:00s) No change
pkgs/main/win-64 [====================] (00m:00s) Done
bioconda/noarch [====================] (00m:01s) Done
conda-forge/noarch [====================] (00m:01s) Done
conda-forge/win-64 [====================] (00m:02s) Done
Encountered problems while solving:
- nothing provides imagemagick needed by wand-0.5.6-py_0
It should work to install ImageMagick natively on your system, and ensure that it is accessible from the command line. Then you could create an environment with a force-installed wand package, the only package that depends on ImageMagick.
Here are the steps to create the environment (called my_env below but name it as you wish):
## create the environment with python (I think you can use 3.6+)
conda create -n my_env python=3.9
## force-install "wand"
conda install -n my_env --no-deps wand=0.6.5
## install pdfplumber
conda install -n my_env pdfplumber
## try using the environment
conda activate my_env
Don't need ImageMagick. Technically, ImageMagick only seems to be used for the "Visual Debugging" functionality of pdfplumber. If you don't need that, then you can forego installing ImageMagick altogether. I verified (on osx-64) that the above environment without ImageMagick could run both the CLI example and the first Python API example from the pdfplumber docs.
Use isolated environment. Because force-installs can be dangerous (read the conda install --help on the --no-deps flag), I strongly recommend creating a dedicated environment for this, as shown above.
Why pin the wand version? I specified a version for wand because that will help prevent Conda from trying to change it in the future when updating.
Mamba is awesome. I highly recommend using Mamba. It's a simple install:
conda install -n base -c conda-forge mamba
then just use mamba whenever you would normally type conda (the exception being the conda activate and conda deactivate commands).