devenv VS buildkit

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.

I don't think you can ever get Nix as simple as PNPM, simply because native libraries are sometimes annoying, need to be configured at build time to a greater degree and because the problem space it attacks is so much larger than PNPM, which only deals with the JS/Node.js ecosystem.

However, I do think that there exist reasonable levels of abstraction that sacrifice some expressive power for simplicity and such systems could maybe expose a PNPM-like CLI. One example that comes to mind is devenv.nix [1]. While it doesn't yet have a CLI, its configuration file is YAML and relatively simple. I think there's more to be done in this space and I hope for tools that are easier to grasp in the future.

> Nix package files evaluate down to configuration for the Nix package manager, but I haven’t ever seen a good explanation for the basic essentials underneath all the abstraction. Every guide I’ve learned from and all the package defs I’ve read seem to cargo cult many layers of mysterious config composing config. Without easy to learn essentials it’s difficult to grok the system as a whole.

To me it sounds like the essential that you're referring to is the 'derivation' primitive, which is almost always hidden behind the mkDerivation abstraction from nixpkgs. This [2] blog post is an exploration of what exactly that means.

I'd also love for the documentation situation to be much better, in particular in terms of official, curated resources. But I'm not convinced that you actually need to know the difference between derivation and mkDerivation to make effective use of Nix, because in practice you would always use the latter. That said, mkDerivation and the whole of nixpkgs is essentially a huge DSL (I believe this is what you meant when you said 'config composing config') that you do need to know and is woefully underdocumented.

> I would love to adopt Nix for developer tooling for Notion’s engineers, but today it’s about infinity times easier to work around the limitations mentioned of Docker+Ubuntu+NPM than to work around the limitations of Nix.

One approach I have taken to is to specify the environment in Nix, but then generate Docker devcontainers from it, so most people don't come into contact with Nix if they don't want to.

[1] https://devenv.sh

[2] https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/derivations/

This though, through the use of devenv.sh, which uses nix, as when I got into nix I though it was going to be easier to just make a development environment, not the case. Until I found devenv.sh, I could actually finally make good environments... It also has other features like containers and services, which also help me know that I can get the most of it if the time comes.

Instructions: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/745

> We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

- BuildOp evaluates its input as additional LLB operations to add to the graph to allow for dynamic build graphs (also unused in the Dockerfile frontend)

With the Dockerfile Explorer, we run the Dockerfile frontend[1] that BuildKit uses inside of WASM to parse and produce the LLB output locally in your browser. We then embed the Monaco Editor so that you can change your Dockerfile to see how it impacts the LLB output that BuildKit will use to build your Docker image.

You can see a quick video and read more details on how it all works here: https://depot.dev/blog/dockerfile-explorer.

We'd love any feedback or ideas folks would like around this type of tool!

[0] https://github.com/moby/buildkit#exploring-llb

Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):

There's a 2-year-old moby/buildkit GitHub issue about frequent build cache misses when using the BuildKit docker-container driver and multi-stage builds. Anyone else in this sub run into this problem and/or have reasonable workarounds? It seems like something that should come up pretty often.

A couple months ago I encountered a bug in buildkit - when enabling OpenTelemetry tracing, we got occasional panics. With a bit of investigation, we found the cause, fixed and tested in our fork and internal deployments, and pushed to upstream.

I do some search in the internet and there seems to be no good solution, so I just create a feature request: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3859

Yeah, only Linux containers at the moment, BuildKit is the way we are constructing pipelines and doing caching. Split on if we will support non-linux hosts, but definitely want to find a good solution to not doing Docker-in-Docker.

Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.