Pixi Shell

The pixi shell command is similar to conda activate but works a little different under the hood. Instead of requiring a change to your ~/.bashrc or other files, it will launch a fresh shell. That also means that, instead of conda deactivate, it's enough to just exit the current shell, e.g. by pressing Ctrl+D.

pixi shell

On Unix systems the shell command works by creating a "fake" PTY session that will start the shell, and then send a string like source /tmp/activation-env-12345.sh to the stdin in order to activate the environment. If you would peek under the hood of the the shell command, then you would see that this is the first thing executed in the new shell session.

The temporary script that we generate ends with echo "PIXI_ENV_ACTIVATED" which is used to detect if the environment was activated successfully. If we do not receive this string after three seconds, we will issue a warning to the user.

Shell Completions

Shell completions for tools in your project are loaded automatically inside pixi shell. This means that if a package in your environment ships completions (e.g. for git or cargo), they will be available without any extra configuration.

Issues With Pixi Shell

As explained, pixi shell only works well if we execute the activation script after launching shell. Certain commands that are run in the ~/.bashrc might swallow the activation command, and the environment won't be activated.

For example, if your ~/.bashrc contains code like the following, pixi shell has little chance to succeed:

# on WSL - the `wsl.exe` somehow takes over `stdin` and prevents `pixi shell` from succeeding
wsl.exe -d wsl-vpnkit --cd /app service wsl-vpnkit start

# on macOS or Linux, some users start fish or nushell from their `bashrc`
# If you wish to start an alternative shell from bash, it's better to do so
# from `~/.bash_profile` or `~/.profile`
if [[ $- = *i* ]]; then
  exec ~/.pixi/bin/fish
fi

In order to fix this, we would advise you to follow the steps below to use pixi shell-hook instead.

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