flox VS process-compose

Sorry you had a frustrating experience. It's definitely us missing the mark.

Re: fish, saw you found the issue someone else opened on it. We have it on our plan and will be adding support soon https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1173

Re: your zsh experience, it's hard to judge exactly what's happening from your comment but we have had other users where the state of activation was suppressed by themes which can cause "environment already active". https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/637 - if you think it's something else or have more detail to share, let us know (either here, github, anywhere).

Thanks for trying Flox!

(Flox employee here)

Hi HN! From the flox team; today we’re thrilled to release the flox CLI beta to the public as an open-source project, to give developers seamless access to the powers of Nix. Try it now via the flox CLI (https://floxdev.com/docs) and check out the repo on https://github.com/flox/flox.

Ask us anything.

The IMO superior https://github.com/F1bonacc1/process-compose project has this built in, while allowing to manage regular programs that don't require containers.

See:

Devbox can also run services too. Both products use an awesome process runner called process-compose (https://github.com/f1bonacc1/process-compose/) which is worth checking out (it's even built with nix!)

I've been using https://github.com/F1bonacc1/process-compose with great success.

It's a userspace process compositor that works across all relevant platforms, supporting daemon processes and k8s style readiness/health checks.

In combination with nix flakes, it quickly reduced my projects docker-compose usage for easy-to-configure services.

This gave huge performance benefits for the M1 Mac folks on my team especially for CPU intensive processes thanks to native binaries.

For maximal ease of use, the remaining docker-compose containers are started/stopped as a process-compose task.

In order to run a simple client-server (1 client, 5 servers) application, I wrote a simple docker-compose file and everything worked great. My dev flow would be the usual: make some changes/optimizations, spin everything up, run a bunch of tests, and go back to step one. At some point, I felt that for my dev environment and language (Linux, golang). docker-compose is great for spinning everything up, but for rapid development, it actually slows me down. I didn't really need containers. I tried to find an alternative solution. Something like a docker-compose, but for native processes, but most of the tools that I found were CI/CD oriented. I like K9S (who doesn't?) and I like docker-compose (some don't), so I built a Frankenstein Monster of them both :) https://github.com/F1bonacc1/process-compose I am not sure if you'll find it as useful as I do, but in any case, any feedback is more than welcome.