devenv
nix-direnv
Our great sponsors
devenv | nix-direnv | |
---|---|---|
88 | 27 | |
3,444 | 1,448 | |
15.2% | 9.3% | |
9.8 | 9.1 | |
2 days ago | 8 days ago | |
Nix | Nix | |
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
devenv
-
Fast, Declarative, Reproduble and Composable Developer Environments Using Nix
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
-
Nix – A One Pager
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.
-
Show HN: Lapdev, a new open-source remote dev environment management software
https://devenv.sh/ and nix in general are great for setting up dev environments.
-
Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix
> but worried that the development is not moving forward
There is an open v1.0 PR: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/1005
-
What's the Next Vagrant?
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)
-
Ask HN: How can I make local dev with containers hurt less?
Yup, I haven’t tried it but there is https://devenv.sh which is built on top of nix and makes it simple.
-
Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
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.
-
NixOS has one fatal flaw
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/
-
Development Environments with Guix, similar to devenv.sh
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.
-
devenv needs help testing 1.0 release
Instructions: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/745
nix-direnv
- A faster, persistent implementation of direnv's use_Nix and use_flake
-
How do multiple versions of the package internally work?
BTW: I personally use direnv with nix-direnv. This basically works by setting your shell with proper tooling when you enter the directory.
-
I have a few beginner question, what is the difference between nix shell/env and what is the difference between flakes/home-manager?
I'm not sure what you mean by nix env, maybe you are referring to nix-direnv?
-
Just a reminder to make sure Garbage Collection is running
Although currently I'm using direnv + nix-direnv. Keep in mind that direnv has builtin nix support which is very basic and doesn't do any caching. So you still needs this add-on to preserve roots.
-
What do you install with configuration.nix and home manager
I distinguish between system level things and user level things, even though I don't really have different users on my machine. I install the bare minimum number of packages + a lot of different drivers in the configuration.nix, and desktop and editor related things in HM. For development environment, I have environment per project using mkShell and https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv, which allows you to switch to the specific environment once you cd into the directory. (Although I do have python installed globally with some commonly used packages such as numpy, so I can just start python and write something when I need to, without creating an environment)
-
How do YOU use your PKMS?
I further make my software projects so that when I click a link I go into an environment pre-loaded with their dependencies so dropping in/out of projects is always frictionless. I do this with the reproducibility guarantees of nix, along with glue like nix-direnv and envrc-mode to direnv.
-
Nuenv: an experimental Nushell environment for Nix
(I also use nix-direnv)
-
NixOS + Haskell best practices circa March 2023
direnv
-
Minimal approach for python devel environment with flake
Personally I use nix-direnv. No longer the need to run nix develop or nix-shell. By setting up a .envrc with either use nix or use flake it will automatically install all the packages from default/shell.nix or flake.nix
-
Nix and envrc
Direnv is installed using the nix-direnv installation instructions under "Via configuration.nix in NixOS". I read some recommendations that envrc.el is a better alternative then direnv.el, and after some testing I have to agree. (envrc-global-mode) is enabled in my config. This works perfectly with a normal emacs instance.
What are some alternatives?
devbox - Instant, easy, and predictable development environments
devshell - Per project developer environments
direnv - unclutter your .profile
flake-utils - Pure Nix flake utility functions [maintainer=@zimbatm]
lorri - Your project's nix-env
rembg - Rembg is a tool to remove images background
flake-templates - A collection of barebone Nix shells for starting a project, provided as flake templates
nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager
naersk - Build Rust projects in Nix - no configuration, no code generation, no IFD, sandbox friendly.
deequ - Deequ is a library built on top of Apache Spark for defining "unit tests for data", which measure data quality in large datasets.
rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]