Using ArcGIS arcpy with Anaconda Python

When you install ArcGIS, you also get a version of Python, a limited set of open source packages and ESRI's python tools, called arcpy. This is a very basic setup. Anaconda Python will be cooked into ArcGIS at some point, but until that time you can use arcpy outside the ESRI environment. Regular ArcGIS installed on most machines requires 32 bit python (current as of ArcGIS 10.4), and we will follow that assumption in what follows. There are some flavors of ESRI products compatible with 64 bit python (also see this).

• Follow the Anaconda steps above, except download and install 32-bit version of Python 2.7 (or 64 bit if you have a special version of Arc).
• Copy Desktop10.4.pth which can be found in C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.4\Lib\site-packages\ to the C:\your_user_name\Anaconda2\Lib\site-packages directory.
• Note: The first time import arcpy is called, it will be slow.
• The above steps are sufficient to use arcpy outside of ArcGIS. This website has a far more detailed approach that uses Anaconda environments. They also offer an approach to access all the Anaconda packages from within ArcGIS, but I was not successful in doing this.

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