Use pixi inside of a devcontainer#
VSCode Devcontainers are a popular tool to develop on a project with a consistent environment. They are also used in GitHub Codespaces which makes it a great way to develop on a project without having to install anything on your local machine.
To use pixi inside of a devcontainer, follow these steps:
Create a new directory .devcontainer
in the root of your project.
Then, create the following two files in the .devcontainer
directory:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:jammy
ARG PIXI_VERSION=v0.34.0
RUN curl -L -o /usr/local/bin/pixi -fsSL --compressed "https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi/releases/download/${PIXI_VERSION}/pixi-$(uname -m)-unknown-linux-musl" \
&& chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pixi \
&& pixi info
# set some user and workdir settings to work nicely with vscode
USER vscode
WORKDIR /home/vscode
RUN echo 'eval "$(pixi completion -s bash)"' >> /home/vscode/.bashrc
{
"name": "my-project",
"build": {
"dockerfile": "Dockerfile",
"context": "..",
},
"customizations": {
"vscode": {
"settings": {},
"extensions": ["ms-python.python", "charliermarsh.ruff", "GitHub.copilot"]
}
},
"features": {
"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-in-docker:2": {}
},
"mounts": ["source=${localWorkspaceFolderBasename}-pixi,target=${containerWorkspaceFolder}/.pixi,type=volume"],
"postCreateCommand": "sudo chown vscode .pixi && pixi install"
}
Put .pixi
in a mount
In the above example, we mount the .pixi
directory into a volume.
This is needed since the .pixi
directory shouldn't be on a case insensitive filesystem (default on macOS, Windows) but instead in its own volume.
There are some conda packages (for example ncurses-feedstock#73) that contain files that only differ in case which leads to errors on case insensitive filesystems.
Secrets#
If you want to authenticate to a private conda channel, you can add secrets to your devcontainer.
{
"build": "Dockerfile",
"context": "..",
"options": [
"--secret",
"id=prefix_dev_token,env=PREFIX_DEV_TOKEN",
],
// ...
}
# ...
RUN --mount=type=secret,id=prefix_dev_token,uid=1000 \
test -s /run/secrets/prefix_dev_token \
&& pixi auth login --token "$(cat /run/secrets/prefix_dev_token)" https://repo.prefix.dev
These secrets need to be present either as an environment variable when starting the devcontainer locally or in your GitHub Codespaces settings under Secrets
.