devenv VS nixos-search

Sounds like nix using devenv[1] also would solve this problem.

https://devenv.sh/

It works on MacOS/Windows, unlike systemd. Therefore it's well suited for development environment setups for polyglot teams.

https://devenv.sh/ is one example that uses it to do just that.

I gave devenv multiple tries, and I am sorry to say there are multiple annoying issues that forced me to give up every time.

Some of these 200+ issues are unsolved for a fairly long time.

https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

https://devenv.sh/ and nix in general are great for setting up dev environments.

> but worried that the development is not moving forward

There is an open v1.0 PR: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/1005

2) A way to run services apps depend on (databases, job runners, cache etc).

I am going to suggest one of the Nix based tools that do those things:

  - https://devenv.sh/ (I use this at work)

Yup, I haven’t tried it but there is https://devenv.sh which is built on top of nix and makes it simple.

Although Guix reads better than Nix (after all, it's Lisp), I found the support and resources available for learning severely lacking.

Plus, you have to jump through hoops to install non-free software, which goes against the ethos of Guix anyway.

IMHO, Nix is clearly "the winner" here and we'll see more and more adoption as it improves. Lots of folks are doing exciting work (see https://determinate.systems/, https://devenv.sh/, https://flakehub.com/). And the scale and organization around nixpkgs is damn impressive.

For me, https://search.nixos.org/ is a better aid than the wiki. Often the right keyword in the NixOS packages or modules search will lead me right to the obvious and simple answer that I couldn't find elsewhere.

Does https://search.nixos.org/ pull from nixpkgs, the Nix User Repository, or both?

Just go to search.nixos.org, open the option you would like to see more of, and click on the link behind "Declared in".

I've done a nix-env query, and checked in https://search.nixos.org but can't seem to find any SAR package, nor any google search that gave any hints to see if it might be part of another system utility package...

If you want to install a package, search for it at https://search.nixos.org

The gnome system monitor is gnome.gnome-system-monitor for example https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.05&show=gnome.g...

search.nixos.org also includes flakes that people PR into the index via GitHub at https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-search/issues

ps: $ nix search exists via experimental flags https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3...

Idk about ec_sys, I couldn't find it on search.nixos.org, but since it's a kernel module it might just come with the kernel idk.

I rarely think to look at flakes by their source, actually. I have a Nixpkgs clone that I jump into for anything super ad-hoc but most of the time I'm just doing REPL, :lf ./. and mashing tab-completion. That's usually to make sure the thing I'm after exists in one of the large package sets like node, vimPlugins, or similar, and that I got the name right - which could probably be answered just as easily with https://search.nixos.org/ .

search.nixos.org