My company is paranoid about somebody violating the Anaconda commercial licensing terms, so it has blocked all access to *.anaconda.com and *.anaconda.org. This, unfortunately, means I can no longer access conda-forge, as it redirects to conda.anaconda.org.
Are there any publicly available mirrors of conda-forge I can use?
We host one at https://prefix.dev/conda-forge.
I know of https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/anaconda/cloud/conda-forge, but it’s has a large latency.
If you want one that’s harder to block, you can try out the mirror on the Github container OCI registry 
It only works with pixi at this point in time and still needs some improvements (like storing the repodata in a more compressed fashion) but should work: Global Configuration - Pixi by prefix.dev
Wow, that is cool that Pixi has support for mirrors. As far as I know, conda and mamba do not have such support? Here I mean listing multiple URLs for a channel and falling back to another one if the first one fails, rather than just changing the channel_alias to a different single URL.
I think this is actually possible in conda/mamba when you use the custom_multichannels setting:
custom_multichannels:
conda-forge:
- https://prefix.dev/conda-forge
- https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/anaconda/cloud/conda-forge
That’s an example based on a couple mirrors listed in this thread.
@thath Ah, I missed that! I actually can’t find any description for custom_multichannels in the documentation (though it is listed) but it is good to know it exists.
Using mirrors seems like a deliberate attempt to circumvent your company’s security policy, so even if their policy is stupid (which it is), they might get upset if they caught you. I can’t believe they would be happy to see you downloading and running software from a Chinese site.
Really they should just block anaconda.com and let anaconda.org through.
You might try reporting bugs to IT every single day until they get sick of you and fix the policy.
I just wanted to update this comment by say that using the custom_multichannels setting is not how to configure mirror usage in conda! I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. There is currently no way to handle this use case in conda.
@wolfv @ruben-arts do you also mirror bioconda? That would be great! Some bioconda users have started asking questions.
@analog-cbarber can you confirm that all the channels one can’t use for free are on anaconda.com? Hence enterprises could simply block anaconda.con but keep letting anaconda.org through?
I doubt that every channel on anaconda.org is necessarily free either. You would have to check with the owner and see if they have published any license that imposes restrictions.
But the conda-forge channel is indeed free.
But really you should not be setting your corporate policy based on what I say. I am not a lawyer and have no affiliation with with Anaconda or conda-forge other than as a user and package publisher.
conda-forge and bioconda channels on anaconda.org are free with no restrictions. They are maintained and governed by their respective communities (not Anaconda). If you ensure that users only pull packages from those 2 channels, you will not violate any ToS from Anaconda.
Hi @croemer,
yes we also have a full mirror of bioconda under https://prefix.dev/bioconda.