process-compose VS devbox

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.

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