Problem description

This issue is mainly related to an application we have for teaching. I try to explain:

• A teacher prepared few Pixi projects for particular tasks. The pixi.toml and their respective lock files are stored in a repo and can simply be downloaded without cloning the repo. An example: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/extrem-gs/school-num/-/tree/main/conda-envs

• We would like the students to just run one command to be able to use one of these environments, something like

pixi shell --file https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/extrem-gs/school-num/-/raw/main/conda-envs/env-fluidsim-mpi/pixi.lock

which would look like something that we already use in practice for courses:

conda env create --file https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/extrem-gs/school-num/-/raw/main/conda-envs/env-fluidsim-mpi.yml

Of course, it would be much better because the students would all use the same frozen environment prepared by the teacher.

It would be great that after a first pixi shell --file ..., the environment could be used again with its name pixi shell --name env-fluidsim-mpi.

I really like Pixi but I didn't find a nice way to use it for such application, which seems quite reasonable and not so exotic.

I tried to use Pixi for this task but currently the result is not so great. Students need to clone the full repo and do something like (see https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/extrem-gs/school-num/-/tree/main/conda-envs)

cd school-num/conda-envs/env-fluidsim-mpi
pixi shell

I would be very interested to know what Pixi devs thing about this potential usage and how Pixi could be useful for this task.