A Guide to Pixi for Astronomy Researchers

Welcome to this guide designed to help astronomy researchers transition from Conda to Pixi, a modern package manager for Python, Rust, C/C++, and others that emphasizes reproducibility, speed, and developer experience.

This guide is broken down into 5 steps, each located in its own subdirectory.

Table of Contents

1. Step One: Your First Pixi Environment
   • Basics: Initialization, running code, shells, and package management.
2. Step Two: Multi-environment
   • Managing conflicting dependencies within the same project using environments.
3. Step Three: Reproducibility
   • Cross-platform lockfiles, system requirements, and environment variables.
4. Step Four: Python Package Development
   • Using pyproject.toml with Pixi and building C extensions.
5. Step Five: Extra Niceties
   • Migrating from Conda, task running, and global tools.