Why choose Pixi for Python Packaging ?

Last updated on 2025-08-25 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • Why Pixi ?
  • What are the benefits of Pixi ?

Objectives

  • To understand the benefits offered by Pixi
  • What is pixi.toml and pyproject.toml
  • What is pixi.lock
  • What do we mean by multi-environment support

Introduction

Pixi is a fast and reproducible package management tool. It has lots of features which are not all present in a single tool at this point in time. Hence we choose this tool. It comes with following features :

  • Native supprt for both PyPI packages and conda
  • Modern
  • Support for multi-language dependency ( E.g. RUST + Python, or Python + C++)
  • Uses uv under the hood.
  • Helps with reproducibility via pixi.lock

Configuration files (pixi.toml and pyproject.toml)

pixi.toml is the file used by Pixi for defining the environment , dependencies and tasks. pyproject.toml is the file in Python ecosystem (PEP 518/621) for configuring the build, distribution and configration of python projects. It is required in build tools like Poetry, Hatch, Flit , setuptools. It specifies metadata (name, version, author). you can also specifiy dependencies here.

Multi-environment support

You can specify the installation of certain tools and packages specific to a particular OS or environmentsl like ( dev, test prod) etc.