# Upcoming switch of Windows installation to pixi/conda

**URL:** <https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916>\
**Category:** ROS General\
**Tags:** ros2, windows, pixi, conda\
**Created:** [February 7, 2025, 3:33pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916 "2025-02-07T15:33:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 11\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![clalancette](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/clalancette/32/4797_2.png) [@clalancette](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/clalancette)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2025, 3:33pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/1 "2025-02-07T15:33:10Z")

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Hello ROS 2 Windows users!

TL;DR - You will have to change how you install ROS 2 on Windows, for Rolling, Jazzy, and Humble. The good news is that it should be much simpler than before.

## What are we doing?

We are changing how the dependencies necessary to build and run ROS 2 are installed on Windows. In particular, we are switching to using [pixi](https://pixi.sh/latest/) to install and manage our dependencies. This has several advantages:

- The installation process is significantly simplified. Instead of dozens of steps to install dependencies, it is just a couple of commands.
- It is much easier to update dependencies, so in the future we shouldn’t have long periods of time stuck on obsolete versions (I’m looking at you, Python 3.8).
- The dependencies are installed in individual workspaces, with no “global” installation. Thus it is easy to work on multiple ROS distributions on the same machine.

## Who will be impacted?

All users of ROS 2 on Windows will be impacted by this change. If you don’t use ROS 2 on Windows, nothing will change for you.

Unlike most changes we do, this also applies to our stable Humble and Jazzy users. While we try to not make big changes for stable distributions, in this case it would be too much work to maintain CI and packaging jobs for the stable distributions, the installation instructions for them would still be complicated, and they would still be using very outdated dependencies.

## How are we doing this?

There is a series of pull requests that implement this. The first set added a pixi.toml file for each of the distributions:

- [Add a pixi.toml file for installation on Windows. by clalancette · Pull Request #1642 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub](https://github.com/ros2/ros2/pull/1642)
- [[Jazzy]: Add a pixi.toml file for installation on Windows. by clalancette · Pull Request #1643 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub](https://github.com/ros2/ros2/pull/1643)
- [[Humble]: Add a pixi.toml file for installation on Windows. by clalancette · Pull Request #1644 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub](https://github.com/ros2/ros2/pull/1644)

There are then two follow-up PRs, one to switch CI over to using these dependencies, and one to update the end-user instructions:

- [https://github.com/ros2/ci/pull/802](https://github.com/ros2/ci/pull/802)
- [https://github.com/ros2/ros2\_documentation/pull/4989](https://github.com/ros2/ros2_documentation/pull/4989)

Once those two PRs are merged, the next release of the respective distributions (Humble, Jazzy, and eventually Kilted) will only work properly using the new dependency system.

## Questions?

If you have questions or comments about this change, please leave them in this thread and we’ll work through them with you.

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**Author:** ![jrivero](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/jrivero/32/239_2.png) [@jrivero](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/jrivero)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2025, 3:49pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/2 "2025-02-07T15:49:15Z")

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Added to all what @clalancette has explained in the post above, I would like also to add that for the ROS 2 Windows platform we are using the great [conda-forge](https://conda-forge.org/) packages as the only source to get the binaries for all the ROS 2 Windows CI dependencies.

I also would like to thanks to the [Robostack](https://robostack.github.io/index.html) project, @traversaro, @Tobias_Fischer, @wolfv, etc. for the help and work on the conda-forge packages over the last years.

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**Author:** ![KimMcG](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/kimmcg/32/23853_2.png) [@KimMcG](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/KimMcG)\
**Post date:** [February 11, 2025, 10:14am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/3 "2025-02-11T10:14:46Z")

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This is awesome. Thank you for this.

I was overexcited and already tried out the instructions only to realize that the latest release zip wasn’t built with python 3.12 yet. I’ll wait patiently until the nex release is available but if you need any testing help let me know.

Gazebo for windows have been using Conda-forge as well. Is the plan for it to also use pixi so we can have a toml file to rule them all?

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**Author:** ![blooop](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/blooop/32/24362_2.png) [@blooop](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/blooop)\
**Post date:** [February 15, 2025, 8:24am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/4 "2025-02-15T08:24:20Z")

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I am not a windows user but would love to be able to use pixi more as part of my ROS workflows on Linux. Do these changes mean there will be more Ros packages available via conda-forge/robostack for linux as well?

Thanks

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**Author:** ![clalancette](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/clalancette/32/4797_2.png) [@clalancette](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/clalancette)\
**Post date:** [February 15, 2025, 1:08pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/5 "2025-02-15T13:08:24Z")

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Not at the moment, no. This will only change the installation of the ROS 2 core dependencies to using pixi/conda.

That said, this definitely opens the door to a more close collaboration between the ROS 2 project and the folks at [Robostack](https://robostack.github.io/), who have been rebuilding ROS 2 packages for a few years now.

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**Author:** ![RFRIEDM](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/rfriedm/32/10410_2.png) [@RFRIEDM](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/RFRIEDM)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2025, 5:01pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/6 "2025-03-21T17:01:16Z")

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I’d just like to share my appreciation for the efforts here. I went through the instructions to build ROS 2 rolling from source on Windows and had a working environment in under an hour. My windows computer at work is heavily locked down. I don’t have administrator access, and this has made ROS development exceedingly difficult to set up in the past.

Pixi eliminates all those problems I had before. I was able to reproduce a windows CI error I saw on the build farm locally. Being able to compile ROS applications natively on Windows with minimal setup now is such a blessing.

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**Author:** ![Felix\_Xu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b3f665/32.png) [@Felix\_Xu](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/Felix_Xu)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2025, 5:35am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/7 "2025-10-16T05:35:57Z")

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yes, I can build on Windows by pixi. But just one problem, it seems that I need to run `pixi shell` to **run** ros2.

I have to do this:

```auto
pixi shell
install\setup.bat

ros2 run rviz2 rviz2

```

can the `pixi shell` command be skipped when running (not building) ros2?

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**Author:** ![traversaro](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/traversaro/32/28_2.png) [@traversaro](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/traversaro)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2025, 10:44am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/8 "2025-10-16T10:44:00Z")

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`pixi shell` is needed to properly activated the pixi environment, a bit like `install\setup.bat `activates the ROS software, i.e. it makes it available by modifying appropriately the environmental variables. If you do not want to open a new shell (like `pixi shell` does), you can also see the environment modified with `pixi shell-hook`. Just to understand, why calling `pixi shell` is a problem while calling `install\setup.bat` is not a problem?

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**Author:** ![christian](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/christian/32/14876_2.png) [@christian](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/christian)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2025, 11:19am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/9 "2025-10-16T11:19:10Z")

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> [@clalancette](#):
>
> That said, this definitely opens the door to a more close collaboration between the ROS 2 project and the folks at [Robostack](https://robostack.github.io/), who have been rebuilding ROS 2 packages for a few years now.

I would really like to see a much closer collaboration between OSRF and RoboStack regarding the packaging and distribution of ROS 2. Replacing the system-specific and native packaging (DEB/RPM/…) with a single conda / RoboStack workflow should free up a lot of resources and maintenance burden, and also disentangles ROS from Ubuntu.

Especially for education and research, being able to install ROS as non-root user independently of the system and together with common machine learning frameworks is a huge improvement compared to the current solution of using the ROS system packages mixed with other pip packages and environments.

So, as a long-time ROS users, I would really like to see the ROS native system packages replaced by RoboStack.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Felix\_Xu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b3f665/32.png) [@Felix\_Xu](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/Felix_Xu)\
**Post date:** [October 24, 2025, 2:40am UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/10 "2025-10-24T02:40:18Z")

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> [@traversaro](#):
>
> why calling `pixi shell` is a problem while calling `install\setup.bat` is not a problem?

not a problem of `pixi shell` at all, just wan to confirm if it’s a problem of myself 🙃

A follow-up question, if I have 2 workspace, one is ros2 source, another one is someother\_ws, how to call the ros2’s `pixi shell` from `someother_ws` ?

In ros2, even in `someother_ws`, I only need to call the local `install/setup.bash` without calling `/opt/ros/humble/setup.bash`. Then in pixi, in my case, should I call `pixi shell` twice? it’s still ok for me, just want to learn how to use pixi in that case.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![traversaro](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/discourse.openrobotics.org/traversaro/32/28_2.png) [@traversaro](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/u/traversaro)\
**Post date:** [October 26, 2025, 4:29pm UTC](https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/upcoming-switch-of-windows-installation-to-pixi-conda/41916/11 "2025-10-26T16:29:13Z")

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> [@Felix\_Xu](#):
>
> In ros2, even in `someother_ws`, I only need to call the local `install/setup.bash` without calling `/opt/ros/humble/setup.bash`. Then in pixi, in my case, should I call `pixi shell` twice? it’s still ok for me, just want to learn how to use pixi in that case.

Interesting, I was not aware of that. Do you have any idea of which piece of code insert the call to `/opt/ros/humble/setup.bash` in `install/setup.bash` ?