Failed to install DeePMD on macOS Tahoe 26.2

[joezhang-rpi]

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are doing well.

When I tried to install DeePMD-kit on my MacBook Pro with Tahoe 26.2 using

$ conda create -n deepmd deepmd-kit lammps -c conda-forge

I always got stuck at the following message:

---

Collecting package metadata (current_repodata.json): done
Solving environment: unsuccessful attempt using repodata from current_repodata.json, retrying with next repodata source.
Collecting package metadata (repodata.json): | WARNING conda.models.version:get_matcher(556): Using .* with relational operator is superfluous and deprecated and will be removed in a future version of conda. Your spec was 1.9.0., but conda is ignoring the . and treating it as 1.9.0
WARNING conda.models.version:get_matcher(556): Using .* with relational operator is superfluous and deprecated and will be removed in a future version of conda. Your spec was 1.8.0., but conda is ignoring the . and treating it as 1.8.0
done
Solving environment:/

---

The process just stopped at 'Solving environment'. Could you please help me with this?

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,
Joe

[njzjz-bot]

The displayed output is the legacy conda solver taking a very long time; it is not yet a DeePMD-kit installation or macOS runtime error. Current conda-forge builds of DeePMD-kit are available for Apple Silicon, so use a current Miniforge/conda installation with the libmamba solver and avoid mixing defaults with conda-forge:

conda config --set solver libmamba
conda create -n deepmd --override-channels -c conda-forge \
  python=3.12 deepmd-kit lammps

Using mamba create with the same arguments is equivalent. If this is an Apple Silicon Mac, verify that uname -m and conda info report the native arm64/osx-arm64 platform rather than an Intel environment running through Rosetta. If the existing base installation is old, installing a fresh current Miniforge is generally quicker than trying to repair its solver metadata.

The warnings about version specifications such as 1.9.0.* are solver warnings from package metadata; they are not the root failure.

Coding agent: Codex
Codex version: codex-cli 0.149.0
Model: gpt-5.6-sol
Reasoning effort: xhigh