nefeli

Nefeli is a conda-native runtime packaging toolkit.

It treats conda metadata as the source of truth, then turns conda recipes, packages, and solved prefixes into artifacts that can run without installing conda on the target machine.

The long-term goal is an undistro: application runtimes built from conda closures instead of inherited from a general-purpose Linux distribution.

What Nefeli Is For

Nefeli is meant to make these paths share one core model:

• build a .conda package from a recipe
• export a package or prefix as a self-contained executable
• export a package or prefix as an OCI image archive
• act as a Pixi build backend for projects that want conda packages as their build output

The important boundary is that package identity and dependency information come from conda. Nefeli should not grow its own package manager, lock format, or Linux distribution layer.

Frontends

The preferred project-facing interface is Pixi build. A workspace can use pixi-build-nefeli as a backend, let Pixi solve the build and host environments, and let Nefeli produce the .conda output.

Lower-level entry points remain useful:

• nefeli <prefix> --entry <path> --output <file> for binary export
• nefeli <package.conda> --output <file> for single-package binary export
• nefeli <prefix> --format oci --output <image.tar> for OCI export

These interfaces should stay thin. Most behavior belongs in the shared core library so build, binary, and OCI outputs do not drift into separate systems.