Support for pixi environments?

[royfrancis]

Any plans to support pixi environments?

[Robinlovelace]

Was about to request the same feature, big 👍 to that, could save lots of time compared with reticulate::install_miniconda()

[n8layman]

+1

[t-kalinowski]

Any plans to support pixi environments?

What features would be needed to support pixi environments?
Does pointing reticulate with env var RETICULATE_PYTHON at a pixi-managed python installation work?

[n8layman]

It would generally follow the roadmap of #1669. Specifically to get it to work currently I found that I needed to:

1. Address the conda-meta/history file bug (currently I've resolved it via an activation script as suggested by John in invalid 'path' argument error when Reticulate looks for Python #1184)
2. Point RETICULATE_PYTHON to the pixi python binary. Adding this RETICULATE_PYTHON="/Users/nathanlayman/homedir/repo/.pixi/envs/default/bin/python"to my .Renviron file worked for me.
3. I'm also having trouble getting things working with radian, though I suspect that's a separate issue, as in Reticulate issue (tensorflow related) randy3k/radian#282

[t-kalinowski]

You linked to the uv issue... does uv address your needs?

Note we have working uv support in the dev version of reticulate right now, see ?py_require(). https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/dev/reference/py_require.html

[n8layman]

I think pixi actually uses uv under the hood! I did test on the dev version but still ended up needing the hacks above to get it to work.

[n8layman]

Another potential issue is that pixi, and uv I think, can manage multiple versions of Python within different environments. I've only tested the one here so far in the .pixi/envs/default environment. But it is possible to have multiple environments in a single project each using a different version of Python.

[pormr]

It would generally follow the roadmap of #1669. Specifically to get it to work currently I found that I needed to:

1. Address the conda-meta/history file bug (currently I've resolved it via an activation script as suggested by John in invalid 'path' argument error when Reticulate looks for Python #1184)
2. Point RETICULATE_PYTHON to the pixi python binary. Adding this RETICULATE_PYTHON="/Users/nathanlayman/homedir/repo/.pixi/envs/default/bin/python"to my .Renviron file worked for me.
3. I'm also having trouble getting things working with radian, though I suspect that's a separate issue, as in Reticulate issue (tensorflow related) randy3k/radian#282

Modifying the conda-meta/history file alone would suffice to make pixi compatible in my use case.

echo -n "# cmd: $CONDA_PREFIX/bin/conda" > $CONDA_PREFIX/conda-meta/history