Pixi Diff

It can happen that you want to know what changed in your lockfile after repeatedly adding and removing dependencies within a pull request. For this, you can use pavelzw/pixi-diff to calculate the differences between two lockfiles. This can be leveraged in combination with pavelzw/pixi-diff-to-markdown to generate a markdown file that shows the diff in a human-readable format. With charmbracelet/glow, you can even render the markdown file in the terminal.

Install the tools globally

All of the above-mentioned tools are available on conda-forge and can be installed using pixi global install.

pixi global install pixi-diff pixi-diff-to-markdown glow-md

pixi diff --before pixi.lock.old --after pixi.lock.new will output a JSON object that contains the differences between the two lockfiles similar to pixi update --json.

$ pixi diff --before pixi.lock.old --after pixi.lock.new
{
  "version": 1,
  "environment": {
    "default": {
      "osx-arm64": [
        {
          "name": "libmpdec",
          "before": null,
          "after": {
            "conda": "https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/osx-arm64/libmpdec-4.0.0-h99b78c6_0.conda",
            "sha256": "f7917de9117d3a5fe12a39e185c7ce424f8d5010a6f97b4333e8a1dcb2889d16",
            "md5": "7476305c35dd9acef48da8f754eedb40",
            "depends": [
              "__osx >=11.0"
            ],
            "license": "BSD-2-Clause",
            "license_family": "BSD",
            "size": 69263,
            "timestamp": 1723817629767
          },
          "type": "conda"
        },
// ...

Named pipes can be handy for comparing lockfiles from different states in your git history:

# bash / zsh
pixi diff --before <(git show HEAD~20:pixi.lock) --after pixi.lock

# fish
pixi diff --before (git show HEAD~20:pixi.lock | psub) --after pixi.lock

Or specify either the "before" or "after" lockfile via stdin:

git show HEAD~20:pixi.lock | pixi diff --before - --after pixi.lock

This can be integrated with pixi-diff-to-markdown to generate a markdown file that shows the diff in a human-readable format:

pixi diff <(git show HEAD~20:pixi.lock) pixi.lock | pixi diff-to-markdown > diff.md

pixi-diff-to-markdown in GitHub Actions updates

For other usages of pixi-diff-to-markdown, see also our page about updating lockfiles using GitHub Actions.

You can view this generated markdown file in your terminal using glow.

glow diff.md --tui

You can also view the markdown file directly from stdin using glow.

pixi diff <(git show HEAD~20:pixi.lock) pixi.lock | pixi diff-to-markdown | glow --tui