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Telemetry#

Pixi sends a small, anonymous ping in two situations:

  1. After a successful installation through the install.sh / install.ps1 scripts.
  2. After pixi self-update successfully updates the binary.

The install scripts run the freshly installed binary to send the ping, so both pings come from Pixi itself. The installer prints a notice when it sends the ping. pixi self-update only pings once you have seen that notice: if you have not (for example because you installed Pixi another way), the first update shows the notice instead of pinging, so you can opt out before anything is sent. Pixi records that the notice was shown in a telemetry-notice-shown file in the cache directory; if that file is removed (for example by pixi clean cache), the notice is shown again on the next update.

That is the only telemetry in Pixi. During normal use — resolving, installing, building, running tasks — Pixi does not phone home. The ping exists so we can estimate how many people install and update Pixi and on which platforms.

Both pings are best-effort: they use a short (3 second) timeout and any error is ignored, so they can never block, slow down, or fail an install or update.

What is sent#

Each ping encodes the following into the request:

  • The event (install or self-update).
  • The Pixi version.
  • The operating system (linux, macos, or windows).
  • The CPU architecture (e.g. x86_64, aarch64).

As with any HTTP request, the receiving server also sees standard request metadata that Pixi does not add on purpose but cannot avoid:

  • Your IP address.
  • The User-Agent, which is pixi/<version>.
  • The time of the request.

Pixi does not send your account, project contents, environment or package lists, file paths, or any generated persistent/unique identifier. We do not correlate pings into a per-machine profile.

Note

We intentionally avoid claiming this is "completely anonymous" or contains "no personal data". Because the request carries your IP address, it is more accurate to describe it as anonymous by design: we only look at aggregate numbers, and nothing in the payload identifies you.

Where it is sent#

The ping goes to https://installation-ping.prefix.dev. Using our own domain means we can point it at a different backend without updating the install scripts or released Pixi binaries.

Behind that endpoint the request is handled by Scarf, which aggregates the pings into install/update counts. Scarf receives the request (including the metadata above) and processes it according to their privacy policy. We only use the resulting aggregate statistics; we do not retain a raw per-request log for our own analysis.

How to opt out#

Set either environment variable to a non-empty value before installing or updating. Pixi treats PIXI_NO_TELEMETRY as its own convention and also honors the ecosystem-wide DO_NOT_TRACK convention. Both disable the ping in the install scripts and in pixi self-update.

# During installation
curl -fsSL https://pixi.sh/install.sh | PIXI_NO_TELEMETRY=1 bash

# For self-update (and any future CLI ping), export it in your shell
export PIXI_NO_TELEMETRY=1
pixi self-update

# During installation
$env:PIXI_NO_TELEMETRY=1; powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm -useb https://pixi.sh/install.ps1 | iex"

# For self-update (and any future CLI ping)
$env:PIXI_NO_TELEMETRY=1
pixi self-update

To disable it permanently, set the variable in your shell's startup file (e.g. ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or your PowerShell profile).