nix-direnv VS devenv

Compare nix-direnv vs devenv and see what are their differences.

nix-direnv

A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10] (by nix-community)

devenv

Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments (by cachix)
Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
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nix-direnv devenv
29 102
2,012 4,804
4.1% 3.2%
7.9 9.9
9 days ago 7 days ago
Shell Nix
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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.

nix-direnv

Posts with mentions or reviews of nix-direnv. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-05-20.

devenv

Posts with mentions or reviews of devenv. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-15.
  • Easy development environments with Nix and Nix flakes!
    9 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2025
    If writing a devshell on your own seems more complicated than necessary, you can use tools like Devenv or Devbox (by the same team that built NixHub), which are both built on Nix. Devenv provides nice wrappers to automatically add languages, services (like postgres or redis), etc. on top of your flake, without having to do the shenanigans we had to do with Valkey. Devbox on the other hand, lets you skip writing Nix entirely, since they have their own CLI and lock file that pull packages from nixpkgs.
  • Mise: Dev tools, env vars, task runner
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2024
  • Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2024
    I've just tried both `devenv` and `flox`, and the latter had two related niceties:

    - Direnv wants to put its config inside the root of a git repo, which makes it hard to ignore. Flox's config is all in a `.flox` directory, so I could `echo * >> .flox/.gitignore` in any repo without changing the repo's gitignore.

    - There seems to be no way to run `direnv` on an environment that's not the current working dir, see https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67.

    OTOH, `flox` was a bit harder to install in an existing nix setup, at least if I wanted to do a cached install. You can follow the instructions in https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6, or you could add yourself to Nix's "trusted users" (which makes sense only if you're the only user on the computer using Nix).

  • Devenv – Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2024
  • An Introduction to Nix for Ruby Developers
    8 projects | dev.to | 21 Aug 2024
    devenv.sh merits exploration too. It is something of a hybrid, with a JSON-like programming language, YAML configuration, and Docker-like composition of services.
  • Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2024
    We've been building https://devenv.sh for that reason, I expect more companies to go back to local development once they see DX has improved locally.
  • Switching from Arch to NixOS
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jul 2024
    I'm of the mindset that NixOS is too much, all at once. I understand the power of the Nix ecosystem, but the barrier of entry remains too high to enter.

    I've switched to using devenv[1] as a first step. This at least allows me to experiment with using nix to configure my dev environment in a per directory fashion, while allowing me to use the Linux distro of my choice.

    [1]: https://github.com/cachix/devenv

  • The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jul 2024
    It would be bring less complexity using https://devenv.sh/ to provide the tooling :-)
  • Python Has Too Many Package Managers
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2024
    If you haven't yet, check out https://devenv.sh. It's pretty nice for python packages and installs your requirements to a project local venv for you via whatever tool you want (pip, poetry, uv etc).

    I've been using it for a couple of years and it's super nice to be able to manage both python and "native" dependencies, and other non-python development tools all together.

    I used just nix and whatever python packages are already in nixpkgs for several projects. And that works really really well until you run into an issue with compatibility like I did. It seems to mostly happen when some extremely common tool like `awscli2` depends on a specific version of some package and so it's pinned.

  • FLaNK-AIM Weekly 13 May 2024
    34 projects | dev.to | 13 May 2024

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nix-direnv and devenv you can also consider the following projects:

devshell - Per project developer environments

devbox - Instant, easy, and predictable development environments

lorri - Your project's nix-env

flox - Developer environments you can take with you

naersk - Build Rust projects in Nix - no configuration, no code generation, no IFD, sandbox friendly.

direnv - unclutter your .profile

nix-config - :space_invader: NixOS configuration

rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

flake-templates - A collection of Nix flake templates for adding a reproducible environment quickly

macpine - Lightweight Linux VMs on MacOS

Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured