I experienced the same issue, but I couldn’t move away from Conda. It seems like the root cause is that specifying an environment.yml file doesn’t set up an isolated Conda environment as expected. Instead, it looks like packages from the environment.yml are added to an existing environment.
For the record, I managed to work around the issue by:

Removing the name: field from my environment.yml

Removing requirements like Jupyter from my environment.yml


This isn’t ideal, as I ended up creating two environment files: One for deployment and one for development (where I use Jupyter, for example). This behaviour is also quite confusing and hard to debug, as the deployed Conda environment differs from my local Conda environment.
@randyzwitch can you please verify that I got this right? In any case, it’s worth documenting the behaviour, though the ideal solution would be for conda env create to yield the same results locally and when deployed.
Thank you!