Variants
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use variants in order to build a Pixi package against different versions of a dependency. Some might call this functionality, build matrix, build configurations or parameterized builds, in the conda ecosystem this is referred to as a variant.
Warning
pixi-build is a preview feature, and will change until it is stabilized.
Please keep that in mind when you use it for your projects.
Why is This Useful?#
When we depend on a Pixi package, the dependency versions of the package itself are already set.
For example, in the C++ tutorial the python_bindings package we built depended on Python 3.12.
Pixi would report a version conflict, if we'd add use both Python 3.11 and python_bindings to our workspace.
By using variants, we can add a set of allowed versions for a specific dependency.
Pixi will then resolve the package with all the different variants.
Let's Get Started#
In this tutorial we will continue with the result of the workspace tutorial so we can test it against multiple Python versions.
As a reminder, we ended up with a top-level pixi.toml containing the workspace and the Python package rich_example.
Our workspace then depended on rich_example and python_bindings.
[dependencies]
python_bindings = { path = "packages/python_bindings" }
rich_example = { path = "." }
The file tree looks like this:
.
├── packages
│ └── python_bindings
│ ├── CMakeLists.txt
│ ├── pixi.toml
│ └── src
│ └── bindings.cpp
├── pixi.lock
├── pixi.toml
├── pyproject.toml
└── src
└── rich_example
└── __init__.py
In order to allow multiple Python versions we first have to change the Python version requirement of python_bindings from 3.12.* to *.
[package.host-dependencies]
cmake = ">=3.20, <3.27"
nanobind = ">=2.4.0, <2.5.0"
python = "*" # (1)!
- Used to be "3.12.*"
Now, we have to specify the Python versions we want to allow.
We do that in workspace.build-variants:
If we'd run pixi install now, we'd leave it up to Pixi whether to use Python 3.11 or 3.12.
In practice, you'll want to create multiple environments specifying a different dependency version.
In our case this allows us to test our setup against both Python 3.11 and 3.12.
[feature.py311.dependencies]
python = "3.11.*"
[feature.py312.dependencies]
python = "3.12.*"
[environments]
py311 = ["py311"]
py312 = ["py312"]
By running pixi list we can see the Python version used in each environment.
You can also see that the Build string of python_bindings differ between py311 and py312.
That means that a different package has been built for each variant.
Since rich_example only contains Python source code, a single build can be used for multiple Python versions.
The package is noarch.
Therefore, the build string is the same.
$ pixi list --environment py311
Package Version Build Size Kind Source
python 3.11.11 h9e4cc4f_1_cpython 29.2 MiB conda python
python_bindings 0.1.0 py311h43a39b2_0 conda python_bindings
rich_example 0.1.0 pyhbf21a9e_0 conda rich_example
$ pixi list --environment py312
Package Version Build Size Kind Source
python 3.12.8 h9e4cc4f_1_cpython 30.1 MiB conda python
python_bindings 0.1.0 py312h2078e5b_0 conda python_bindings
rich_example 0.1.0 pyhbf21a9e_0 conda rich_example
Conclusion#
In this tutorial, we showed how to use variants to build multiple versions of a single package.
We built python_bindings for Python 3.12 and 3.13, which allows us to test whether it works properly on both Python versions.
Variants are not limited to a single dependency, you could for example try to test multiple versions of nanobind.
Thanks for reading! Happy Coding 🚀
Any questions? Feel free to reach out or share this tutorial on X, join our Discord, send us an e-mail or follow our GitHub.