The prefix.dev Blog

Octoconda - turning Github Releases into Conda Packages

2026-03-10T00:00:00.000Z

Someone releases a great tool with perfectly working pre-built binaries on Github, but there's no Conda package. Octoconda helps out: It takes the release artifact and re-packages it for use in the Conda eco-system.

Packaging AI/ML models as conda packages

2026-02-27T00:00:00.000Z

Distribute AI models with trust and ease.

Flickzeug – or why patching source code is hard

2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

TL;DR - we have extended the Rust crate diffy to be able to patch real-world source code with real-world patches, which is surprisingly hard! In the process we renamed it to flickzeug.

Seeking Reproducible Research Software: How the UW Scientific Software Engineering Center Adopted Pixi

2026-02-06T00:00:00.000Z

At the University of Washington Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC), our mission is to enhance our partners software development capabilities to bolster their research. In scientific research, reproducibility is the gold standard. The ability for another researcher to take your code, data, and environment to arrive at the exact same results is essential.

Introducing Pixi GUI

2026-02-03T00:00:00.000Z

Hi, I’m Felix. I’m excited to share what I’ve been building over the past few months! Since last year I work as a working student at prefix.dev. As part of my bachelor's thesis, I designed and implemented a graphical user interface for the package manager Pixi, named Pixi GUI.

Publishing Conda Packages on Amazon S3

2025-11-24T00:00:00.000Z

We worked together with AWS Deadline Cloud to improve S3 support in our tools! Pixi and rattler-build now seamlessly authenticate using default credentials on your system, making it simple to upload, download and index packages on S3 buckets.

Building your own build backend for Pixi

2025-11-19T00:00:00.000Z

Normally, development tooling and package publishing live in separate worlds: you use one workflow to build and test your software locally, and a completely different one to publish it. Wouldn't it be great to use the same manifest that describes your project environment to also define how the package is built, versioned, and released?

ESOC Report: Implementing Pixi Extensions

2025-11-10T00:00:00.000Z

Hey there! I'm Swastik. I completed a 3-month internship at prefix.dev under the ESoC'25 (European Summer of Code) program, and this blog is all about my internship experience.

Pixi: Modern package management for Robotics

2025-10-24T00:00:00.000Z

Developing Robots is hard; Pixi makes it easier by creating reproducible, cross-platform ROS development environments without Docker or Ubuntu lock-in.

Cross compiling in the Conda ecosystem

2025-10-14T00:00:00.000Z

Cross compiling is a fundamental capability in modern software development, allowing developers to build packages for different architectures without needing access to the target hardware.

Introducing a New Identity for Prefix.dev

2025-10-09T00:00:00.000Z

Since 2021 we've used the same identity and the website was mostly consistent, today we are transitioning to a new identity.

Using Pixi as a System Package Manager with Shortcuts and Completions

2025-09-18T00:00:00.000Z

Pixi Global can be used for much more than just downloading and exposing CLI tools. In this blog post, we demonstrate two capabilities of pixi global which are core to making it a featureful and powerful system package manager: shortcuts, and (auto-)completions.

Mutex packages in the Conda Ecosystem

2025-09-11T00:00:00.000Z

Mutex packages are a useful mechanism to guide the solver towards certain dependencies, mutually excluding other dependency trees.

Build C++ projects with Pixi

2025-09-05T00:00:00.000Z

Painless dependency management (including shared libraries), monorepos and CI/CD is here for C++/CMake projects with Pixi.

Securing the Conda Package Supply Chain with Sigstore

2025-08-28T00:00:00.000Z

We're pleased to announce that sigstore support is now in public beta on prefix.dev! The Conda ecosystem can now use Sigstore to enhance the Software Supply Chain Security with cryptographic attestations.

How FreeCAD uses Pixi

2025-07-31T00:00:00.000Z

This is a guest blog post by Jackson Oursland - a FreeCAD maintainer and esteemed member of the conda-forge and Pixi community! FreeCAD uses Conda packages to build AppImages, DMG and Windows artifacts. Pixi greatly simplifies the developer workflow.

What linking means when installing a Conda package

2025-07-17T00:00:00.000Z

Package managers face a fundamental challenge: how to efficiently place files from a package cache into multiple environments without excessive disk usage or compromising isolation.

Virtual Packages in the Conda ecosystem

2025-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

Virtual packages are a neat trick to inject system requirements into the SAT solver and resolve for compatible packages automatically. In this blog post we talk about how they are used in the Conda ecosystem to support complex cross-platform package distributions.

What is a Conda package, actually?

2025-06-11T00:00:00.000Z

At its core, a conda package really is just a "glorified" tarball—a compressed archive of files with some metadata attached.

S3 support in Pixi and rattler-build

2025-06-02T00:00:00.000Z

We're excited to announce S3 support across our entire toolchain – rattler, pixi, and rattler-build now support the most common cloud storage standard, thanks to contributions from our friends at QuantCo. This vendor-agnostic approach to distributing Conda packages represents a major step forward for the ecosystem, offering teams the flexibility to host packages on any S3-compatible provider (AWS, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Hetzner, and more) with built-in authentication and minimal vendor lock-in.

Less Boilerplate, More Logic: Parameterising Pixi Tasks

2025-04-30T00:00:00.000Z

Introducing powerful extensions to the existing task system

Enhancing the Conda Ecosystem in 2025

2025-03-21T14:37:00.000Z

We are working on some exciting Conda Enhancement Proposals (CEP) in 2025. Read more about them here.

Trusted publishing to conda channels

2024-12-12T15:12:00.000Z

Never forget your API keys again—with trusted publishing to prefix's channels

Pixi Global: Declarative Tool Installation

2024-11-13T15:21:00.000Z

Think Homebrew, but cross-platform and easy to share with collaborators

Building CPU optimized packages for conda-forge

2024-09-06T18:07:00.000Z

Did you know your packages could be even faster by enabling optimized CPU instructions? Learn how to build optimized packages for conda-forge.

rattler-build in conda-forge

2024-08-15T15:31:00.000Z

rattler-build — the revolutionary build tool for the conda ecosystem (almost) available in conda-forge

Towards a Vendor-Lock-In-Free conda Experience

2024-08-15T00:00:00.000Z

Why conda-forge is expected to remain free and open-source in the foreseeable future

WASM + Conda: Revolutionizing Scientific Computing in the Browser

2024-07-30T00:00:00.000Z

Did you know that Conda packages can be built for WASM? Read more on how to build and use them with pixi!

Pixi - reproducible, scientific software workflows!

2024-06-08T00:00:00.000Z

As scientists, your focus should be on research, not wrestling with software environments. At this year's SciPy conference, we're excited to show Pixi.

50x faster solves with sharded repodata

2024-05-28T00:00:00.000Z

Repodata fetching can be painfully slow. We propose an alternative method that can speed things up drastically.

The joy of building conda packages with rattler-build

2024-05-08T00:00:00.000Z

Learn how to integrate rattler-build into the conda-forge ecosystem, covering the essentials of conda-build and rattler-build, and how to create modern conda packages.

Using Python Projects With Pixi

2024-04-27T00:00:00.000Z

pixi 0.18.0 ships with git, path and editable PyPI dependencies, improved PyPI <-> Conda mapping and experimental pyproject.toml support.

Introducing Pixi's Multiple Environments

2024-03-18T00:00:00.000Z

Unleash the power of multiple environments — for the real power user.

7 Reasons to Switch from Conda to Pixi

2024-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

Pixi is conda-compatible and comes with: more speed, lockfiles and tasks. It is the next-gen pacage manager for Python, R and more!

Adopting uv in pixi

2024-02-20T00:00:00.000Z

tl;dr we're integrating uv into pixi

Building a C++ package with rattler-build

2024-02-14T07:17:00.000Z

Conda packages are not only for Python! Learn how to build a C++ pacakge with conda-froge and rattler-build

Reproducible Notebooks with Pixi

2024-02-14T00:00:00.000Z

Data scientists and researchers love to work with Jupyter Notebooks. Pixi makes it easy and more reproducible than ever!

rattler-build: A new parser

2024-01-12T07:21:00.000Z

We have rewritten the rattler-build recipe parser with great developer experience in mind.

Prefix.dev — End of 2023

2024-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

Follow what we have created this year, and plan for the next year.

Unleashing PyPI support in pixi

2023-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

We've deeply integrated PyPI packages into pixi.toml's — read more...

Introducing Py-Rattler

2023-10-25T00:00:00.000Z

Py-Rattler the Python partner to the blazingly fast rattler library.

Introducing rip — the fast & barebones pip implementation

2023-10-19T00:00:00.000Z

`rip` resolves and installs packages from PyPI from pure Rust

Let Roboticists Stress About Boxes not Packages

2023-10-04T00:00:00.000Z

Learn why `pixi` and the conda ecosystem are perfect of robotics.

Let's stop dependency hell

2023-08-16T00:00:00.000Z

Pixi is a new package manager for the conda ecosystem, written in Rust. It's fast multi-platform, and language-agnostic.

The new Rattler Resolver

2023-08-11T00:00:00.000Z

We wrote a new, fast SAT solver for conda packages in Rust – a port of the libsolv C library.

Why we support PackagingCon

2023-08-08T10:21:00.000Z

prefix.dev is going to be at PackagingCon 2023, the software packaging conference

How we implemented API keys for prefix!

2023-06-22T09:32:00.000Z

It's easy to overlook how important security is when implementing API keys

Introducing Channels: Host Your Own Packages

2023-05-23T09:13:00.000Z

You can now host your own packages on prefix.dev

The new rattler-build

2023-05-10T00:00:00.000Z

We are releasing a Rust based conda-build replacement that builds cross-platform binary packages much faster.

Repodata patching: how conda-forge keeps compatible

2023-04-25T16:36:00.000Z

Keeping packages in a large repository compatible over time is tricky. conda-forge has a highly useful mechanism for that: repodata-patching.

Introducing Rattler: Conda from Rust

2023-03-01T16:22:00.000Z

At prefix.dev we love Rust, but using conda/mamba from Rust is hard, so we started building Rattler, a set of crates that offer clean, compartmentalized building blocks for package management.

Introducing Online Environment Solving

2023-02-21T15:41:00.000Z

We've released our first version of online environment solving.

To upper bound or not – the Python packaging debates

2023-02-15T15:02:00.000Z

A hot debate is happening in the Python packaging world – should you use upper bounds to constrain your dependencies or not? We think there must be a better way.

Mamba 1.2 Release

2023-01-19T15:33:00.000Z

We've released mamba 1.2 and here are all the improvements

Launching prefix.dev

2022-11-08T15:29:00.000Z

We are excited to tell you more about what we are up to!

We're hiring

2022-10-01T23:59:00.000Z

We are hiring engineers to work on developer tools (C++, Rust), our platform (Rust, TypeScript, React) and conda-forge (Python, CI pipelines)...