process-compose VS pkgx

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.

I’m liking pkgx over asdf as it can activate project tooling upon cd’ing into a project folder.

https://pkgx.sh

I saw some alternatives being suggested and wanted to do the same (Also, so that I can look back at this item, through my comments :) ). Started using https://pkgx.sh/ lately. I know it has some baggage with tea.xyz and crypto, but it is also easy to get started with.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

1. pkgx

Before diving in, it's a good idea to have a package manager handy, like tea. It'll handle your development environment and simplify your life!

Direct fast-track link to repo

checkout https://github.com/teaxyz/cli and https://github.com/teaxyz/pantry

Install is tea: sh <(curl https://tea.xyz) and