Opening Positron via SSH and Activating Conda Environment

[laguill]

Hello,

I’m trying to figure out if it's possible to open Positron (the IDE) from the command line and connect to a remote host via SSH. My goal is to:

Launch Positron from the command line.
Establish an SSH connection to a remote host.
Activate a specific Conda environment on the remote host within Positron.
Does anyone know how to achieve this, or if there’s a straightforward way to configure Positron to automatically connect to an SSH host and activate a Pixi environment?

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

[nstrayer]

There is (mostly undocumented) ssh remote host support. See #4251.

However, there may be issues using Pixi (#5248). How important is Pixi to this workflow?

[laguill]

I am using Pixi as an environment manager.
Connecting to the remote server via SSH from Positron works fine.

The issue arises during local development when I need Positron to recognize the Quarto package installed with conda in my environment.

To achieve this locally, I have to execute the following commands:

cd project
pixi shell
positron .

However, I am wondering if it is possible to achieve the same setup when working over SSH. The challenge is that Positron is installed locally, while the Pixi environment resides on the remote server.

[juliasilge]

Are you wanting to use a pixi environment for R or Python? If it is for Python, I believe this should "just work", i.e. you can establish an SSH connection to a remote host, and then your pixi Python environment on the remote host should be discovered, can be selected, can start, etc.

Unfortunately, for R, I do not expect this would work right now because of #4398 and #3724; we do not automatically detect these R interpreters.

[juliasilge]

We've just merged in docs on remote SSH development at https://positron.posit.co/remote-ssh if you'd like to read more.