Windows vs Mac Caching

[joshualeond]

Hi there! As a Julia user, I'm super excited to see this package manager coming to Python!

I have a question about caching. When I use pixi on my Windows device I see that it creates a .pixi folder within my project. This folder usually ends up containing thousands of files and is > 1 GB for smaller projects:

To me it looks like it's not actually using the cached directory that I see in the pixi info: C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Local\rattler/cache.

When I use pixi on my Mac I'm not seeing this .pixi folder anywhere within the individual project.

Is this how it is designed to function or have I done something wrong on the user side?

Thanks!

[ruben-arts]

Hello,

After a pixi install there should always be a .pixi folder in the project root folder. On all platforms we support.
The 1GB that you see should be linked to the cache.

Edit, reading on my phone isn't a good idea...

I'll check the cache dirs on my Windows machine tomorrow!

On your Mac the . Folders might be hidden.

Hopefully this helps

[joshualeond]

Hi! This does help, I see now that it was just hidden on my Mac. Is there documentation around how this caching/linking works? I'm still a bit confused as to why the local .pixi folders grow so large. Thanks!

[ruben-arts]

We don't have a lot of documentation that really explains the logic in depth. Here is a short portion on the cache https://pixi.sh/latest/features/environment/#caching

[joshualeond]

Thank you! I dived a little deeper and I see the conda-meta directory with the json files that point to the extracted package in the cache.

Does pixi then essentially copy/paste these extracted files from the cache into the local .pixi directory?

[ruben-arts]

Apart from some specific files that need to be modified to install. It should either hard-link or reflink the files into the .pixi folder. I'm still trying to find a proper tool to really visualize the actual data on your device taken up by pixi.

[joshualeond]

Oh okay, apologies for the confusion. I was able to test this by looking into one of my local .pixi directories and running the following command against something within the folder (like python.exe):

fsutil hardlink list python.exe

It then showed me all of the hardlinks:

\Users\myusername\AppData\Local\rattler\cache\pkgs\python-3.12.2-h2628c8c_0_cpython\python.exe
\Users\myusername\Documents\stan-test\.pixi\envs\default\python.exe

I get this better now. Thank you for the response.