Install Anaconda 2 to /opt/anaconda2

By default, Anaconda 4.2 for Python 2 will install itself to the user's home directory on Linux. This is great for local development, but for server-side deployment and testing it's better to install to a shared location.

The install docs are pretty vague about how to set this up, saying simply, "Install Anaconda as a user unless root privileges are required." The way I've made this work easily on an Amazon EC2 running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is as follows.

1. Download the appropriate installer
2. Install as a superuser with sudo bash Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
3. Install to /opt/anaconda2 and prepend the install location to PATH in ~/.bashrc
4. Change the target directory's group ownership to ubuntu and grant g+w permission for the directory and all its subdirectories

In short, something like this will work beautifully, allowing packages to still be installed simply using conda install or pip install.