Transitioning from poetry to pixi

Welcome to the guide designed to ease your transition from poetry to pixi. This document compares key commands and concepts between these tools, highlighting pixi's unique approach to managing environments and packages. With pixi, you'll experience a project-based workflow similar to poetry while including the conda ecosystem and allowing for easy sharing of your work.

Why Pixi?

Poetry is most-likely the closest tool to pixi in terms of project management, in the python ecosystem. On top of the PyPI ecosystem, pixi adds the power of the conda ecosystem, allowing for a more flexible and powerful environment management.

Quick look at the differences

Task	Poetry	Pixi
Creating an Environment	poetry new myenv	pixi init myenv
Running a Task	poetry run which python	pixi run which python pixi uses a build-in cross platform shell for run where poetry uses your shell.
Installing a Package	poetry add numpy	pixi add numpy adds the conda variant. pixi add --pypi numpy adds the PyPI variant.
Uninstalling a Package	poetry remove numpy	pixi remove numpy removes the conda variant. pixi remove --pypi numpy removes the PyPI variant.
Building a package	poetry build	We've yet to implement package building and publishing
Publishing a package	poetry publish	We've yet to implement package building and publishing
Reading the pyproject.toml	[tool.poetry]	[tool.pixi]
Defining dependencies	[tool.poetry.dependencies]	[tool.pixi.dependencies] for conda, [tool.pixi.pypi-dependencies] or [project.dependencies] for PyPI dependencies
Dependency definition	- numpy = "^1.2.3" - numpy = "~1.2.3" - numpy = "*"	- numpy = ">=1.2.3 <2.0.0" - numpy = ">=1.2.3 <1.3.0" - numpy = "*"
Lock file	poetry.lock	pixi.lock
Environment directory	~/.cache/pypoetry/virtualenvs/myenv	./.pixi Defaults to the project folder, move this using the detached-environments

Support both poetry and pixi in my project

You can allow users to use poetry and pixi in the same project, they will not touch each other's parts of the configuration or system. It's best to duplicate the dependencies, basically making an exact copy of the tool.poetry.dependencies into tool.pixi.pypi-dependencies. Make sure that python is only defined in the tool.pixi.dependencies and not in the tool.pixi.pypi-dependencies.

Mixing pixi and poetry

It's possible to use poetry in pixi environments but this is advised against. Pixi supports PyPI dependencies in a different way than poetry does, and mixing them can lead to unexpected behavior. As you can only use one package manager at a time, it's best to stick to one.

If using poetry on top of a pixi project, you'll always need to install the poetry environment after the pixi environment. And let pixi handle the python and poetry installation.