FAQ: Can I have two versions of a package in the same environment?

Submitted originally by: dan.stern

It depends on the package/software whether two versions can be installed at once. The recommended solution for this use case is to create two projects with two different compute environments that have the different package versions installed.

There may be times when you need workloads to run against different versions of software packages. However, keeping two version of any software in the same compute environment, or on any computer for that matter, can cause subtle and difficult to diagnose issues. They may also be fine, but since we have no easy way to know which packages will be ok we don't recommend it.

Fortunately for this use case its a fairly straightforward solution. Create two projects with different compute environments with the different versions in each compute environment. With python packages this could also be managed with different requirements.txt files as opposed to the compute environments.