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Packaging

This is a guide for distribution maintainers wanting to package pixi for a different package manager. Users of pixi can ignore this page.

Building#

Pixi is written in Rust and compiled using Cargo, which are needed as compile-time dependencies. At runtime pixi needs no dependencies in other than the runtime it was compiled against (libc, ...).

To build pixi run

cargo build --locked --profile dist
Instead of using the predefined dist profile, which is optimized for binary size, you can also pass other options to let cargo optimize the binary for other metrics.

Build-time Options#

Pixi provides some compile-time options, which can influence the build

TLS#

By default, pixi is built with Rustls TLS implementation. You can compile pixi using the platform native TLS implementation using by adding --no-default-features --feature native-tls to the build command. Note that this might add additional runtime dependencies, such as OpenSSL on Linux.

Self-Update#

Pixi has a self-update functionality. When pixi is installed using another package manager one usually doesn't want pixi to try to update itself and instead let it be updated by the package manager. For this reason the self-update feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by adding --feature self_update to the build command.

When the self-update feature is disabled and a user tries to run pixi self-update an error message is displayed. This message can be customized by setting the PIXI_SELF_UPDATE_DISABLED_MESSAGE environment variable at build time to point the user to the package manager they should be using to update pixi.

PIXI_SELF_UPDATE_DISABLED_MESSAGE="`self-update` has been disabled for this build. Run `brew upgrade pixi` instead" cargo build --locked --profile dist

Custom version#

You can specify a custom version string to be used in the --version output by setting the PIXI_VERSION environment variable during the build.

PIXI_VERSION="HEAD-123456" cargo build --locked --profile dist

Shell completion#

After building pixi you can generate shell autocompletion scripts by running

pixi completion --shell <SHELL>
and saving the output to a file. Currently supported shells are bash, elvish, fish, nushell, powershell and zsh.