Environment Management

This unit introduces environment management tools to ensure reproducibility and ease of use in research workflows. It covers two powerful tools: Conda and Pixi.

Conda is a widely used package manager that allows users to create isolated environments for managing dependencies and ensuring reproducibility across platforms. Participants will learn how to use Conda for creating environments, managing packages from different sources (like conda-forge and PyPI), and exporting environment configurations for sharing with collaborators. The unit covers essential Conda commands for creating, activating, and managing environments, as well as methods for exporting and importing environment configurations to ensure consistent environments for future use.

Pixi, a modern package and environment manager, will also be introduced in this unit. Pixi is designed to streamline the management of packages and environments for reproducible research. Participants will learn how to initialize a pixi.toml workspace, add dependencies, and activate isolated environments. The unit covers how to install packages from both conda-forge and PyPI, manage environments across platforms, and share reproducible configurations using lockfiles.