conda create -n nikola python=3.6 lxml docutils Pillow MarkupSafe mako Pygments six python-dateutil cloudpickle requests unidecode natsort decorator traitlets tornado ptyprocess pexpect pickleshare appnope simplegeneric wcwidth ipython pyzmq jupyter ipykernel Jinja2 Markdown PyYAML mistune html5lib bleach jsonschema nbformat entrypoints nbconvert terminado notebook watchdog macfsevents
then activate the new environment
conda activate nikola
now install nikola
pip install nikola[extras]
ref: https://homepages.uc.edu/~schreihf/uchenry/post/setting-up-nikola/