nixpkgs
devenv
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nixpkgs | devenv | |
---|---|---|
974 | 88 | |
15,656 | 3,410 | |
5.3% | 15.2% | |
10.0 | 9.8 | |
2 days ago | 8 days ago | |
Nix | Nix | |
MIT License | Apache License 2.0 |
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.
nixpkgs
- Maintainers Leaving
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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset
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Eelco Dolstra's leadership is corrosive to the Nix project
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup
For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...
For example,
```
- NixOS/nixpkgs: There isn't a clear canonical way to refer to a specific package
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NixOS Is Not Reproducible
Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...
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The xz attack shell script
I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...
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Debian Git Monorepo
NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.
I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.
Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
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From xz to ibus: more questionable tarballs
In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...
[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...
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GitHub Disabled the Xz Repo
True, but irrelevant -- _some packages_, _somewhere_, do depend on xz, which, if built, requires pulling the source from GitHub (see the default.nix: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.11/pkgs/tools...)
It's not the vulnerability that's a problem right now (NixOS was protected by a couple of factors) but rather GitHub's hamfisted response.
That is the problem.
devenv
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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/
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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.
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devenv needs help testing 1.0 release
Instructions: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/745
What are some alternatives?
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
devbox - Instant, easy, and predictable development environments
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
nix-direnv - A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10]
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
direnv - unclutter your .profile
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
devshell - Per project developer environments
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
rembg - Rembg is a tool to remove images background
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.
nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager