Monorepos and Workspaces

[humphd]

I'm really loving pixi (it's amazing!), especially for my projects that include multiple languages. A number of these are monorepos, and I wanted to seek some guidance on how best to use pixi in a monorepo setup.

I'm coming from the JS/node.js ecosystem, where I'm used to using tools like pnpm and workspaces, such that I can have a top-level config (package.json and pnpm-workspace.yml) and lock file, with nested projects only needing their own config. Doing an install at the root of the monorepo recursively installs things, and using -r I can recursively run tasks throughout the monorepo.

How would you suggest I use pixi in such cases? Currently what I'm doing is using pixi at the root to install global tooling (node, python, etc) and pnpm for my JS sub-projects. For the Python sub-projects, I've opted for another pixi.toml and pixi.lock file within the sub-project, which handles things like installing requirements.txt as a task.

Installing everything at the root seems wrong, but I feel like there must be a better solution than what I'm doing. Has anyone done this and can provide guidance?

[ruben-arts]

Glad to hear you're enjoying it! 😃

The workspace story has already come to our minds multiple times, we're heavy users of the Cargo workspaces, as our main library https://github.com/mamba-org/rattler is using it.

We want to take what we can learn from that and apply it to pixi, pnpm indeed has a similar workspace setup but not build into the main configuration file, which is something we would definitely like to do.

This however is on our backlog, and some other features are having our priority right now. Not to discourage you of using pixi but I don't want to share unreachable deadlines kuchElonMuskkuch.

A solution for your situation right now depends on the use of your nested projects.

• If you're building a single running app that needs all the dependencies available at the moment of running the application I would say the pixi.toml at the top-level should be your best option.
• If you're using all projects separately, for instance a python back-end server and a JS front-end. Then I would advice separate them in different pixi projects which you just start by moving into those projects and activating them separately. This will help with bundling parts of your monorepo, e.g. into docker containers or separate packages(conda, pip, node, etc).

I would like this discussion to stay open and welcoming to ideas and wishes for a "Workspace" implementation" 💡

[humphd]

I get that this is a feature that needs thought and will take time to figure out. In the meantime, I'm glad to know that I'm not missing some obvious solution for getting a workable system. I agree with you re: optimizing for dockerizing parts of the monorepo, and using separate pixi.toml files per project.

Thanks for the quick reply and all the amazing work on pixi!

[majidaldo]

i've pushed this idea to the limit with conda https://github.com/pnnl/hydraconda. i had a venv for every "workspace" and deps b/w these workspaces.

pixi would form a much better basis.

[jacksonwb]

Would really love to see a way to have a project A defined in a pixi.toml. And then another project B defined next to it in source with its own pixi.toml that can point to project A via a path dependency.

Then be able to build and run project A by itself, or build and run project B that then automatically builds A. And ideally be able to create packages with correct named version dependencies for release.

[majidaldo]

Yup that's what I did above

[xiaoxiangmoe]

uv support workspace dependencies now.
https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/dependencies/#workspace-member

Here is a example

.
├── packages
│   └── hello
│       ├── pyproject.toml
│       └── src
│           └── hello
│               ├── __init__.py
│               └── py.typed
├── pyproject.toml
├── src
│   └── main.py
└── uv.lock

[project]
name = "playground-monorepo"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "Add your description here"
requires-python = ">=3.13"
dependencies = [
    "hello",
]

[tool.uv.sources]
hello = { workspace = true }
[tool.uv.workspace]
members = ["packages/*"]

[KevinEdry]

Any updates on this? We would really like to see a Pixi implementation of a monorepo.

[Andre-Medina]

Hey, I coincidentally just managed to get pixi mono repos working in this template feel free to take a look.