plugin-foreign-env VS nix

I am not using Guix's Fish because right I just installed it and was hoping to kinda get my packages up to snuff for what I keep on my desktop. Though I was about to install foreign-env via omf and that seems to work! I am super new to Guix so I still gotta read up on Guix Home. I literally have only installed like 6 packages right now haha.

The official installer leverages an initialization script, to be sourced at shell init time, which is written in POSIX shell. Fish can't just source it because it's not compatible with POSIX shell.

> I then searched the Internet and found a very "creative" workaround for Arch users that didn't work either.

Arch users shouldn't need anything special here.

You can use fenv¹ to source it, you can translate it to bash using babelfish, or you can exec into fish after running bash to log in (make sure to set $SHELL after if you choose that option). Just make sure you do it as early as possible if you want to use things installed by Nix in your other Fish config snippets.

I think Home Manager will also take care of this for you. (The other module systems, Nix-Darwin and NixOS, both do.)

If you wanna do it like NixOS does, you can install Fish via Nix and then create your own preinit environment script in /etc/fish. This has the advantage of setting up your Nix environment variables before any other config is sourced. You can take a look at it here, which also explains some of the Fish initialization process: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

and here's where the hooks go in the Fish package, where the comments describe the Fish initialization process in detail as well as why things are done this way on NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

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1: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-foreign-env

2: https://github.com/bouk/babelfish

That's just not true, most stuff already has a fish equivalent, and for the minority which doesn't there are plugins like foreign-env

I'm also interested in the correct way of doing this. Right now, I cheat by using the fenv plugin to source a bash ~/.profile file:

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

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.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity