Having to switch constantly between group clusters,local machines, and supercomputers where I don't always have root permission to install things (which is important for some more heavyweight Python packages that uses Cython), porting python code that has a bunch of dependencies on external packages was a pain. My previous fear with anaconda is that it doesn't support as much packages as I want so I've been a big believer of pip (with the --user option). virtualenv, and building from source code. But after switching to anaconda, my life is much easier. In this article I will show you how to setup anaconda and also install external packages to build from source using anaconda.
First, we get the anaconda distribution from their website, then run the executable. There are some agreements that you have to read through, and make sure you don't overclick. Then after the installation, you refer to the version of anaconda python by its path, this points to the anaconda python and not whatever default python you have installed in your system.
wget https://3230d63b5fc54e62148e-c95ac804525aac4b6dba79b00b39d1d3.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/Anaconda-2.3.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Anaconda-2.3.0-Linux-x86_64.sh –b –p $HOME/anaconda
$HOME/anaconda/bin/conda install yt
alias apy="$HOME/anaconda/bin/python"
alias conda="$HOME/anaconda/bin/conda"