nix.dev VS devbox

Nix (https://nix.dev/) can provide all of this, although in a smarter way than just through dumping everything in the VCS. Some projects use it already to provide a reproducible development environment and if done right a clean build is just a `nix-build` away.

Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them.

https://nixos.org/explore

https://nix.dev/

if you want something a more in-depth, zero to nix is a great resource for all things nix (they have a section dedicated to flakes here, but i would pay attention to the notice at the top about reading some other things first), along with nix.dev, and of course, the nixos wiki article on flakes

On nix.dev it say I would need to cross compile to make it work, is there some way in which i can build natively on my machine.

Hey

Cachix founder here. Here are a few links for getting started:

- https://nix.dev Nix tutorials

- https://devenv.sh Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments

Let me know if you have any questions. Domen

Nix pills and nix.dev are my favorites, alongside the official documentation.

https://nix.dev/ is the best in depth resource I know but it's a work in progress.

For folks looking to understand why this is so https://nix.dev and https://devenv.sh/

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).

You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers).

We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox