Devenv Alternatives

devenv reviews and mentions

• Devenv Telemetry Warning
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2025

  Yes, still sending the data is bad.

  Their docs [1] do not mention the generate command can take an exclusion argument [2]. Maybe the dot (.) for current directory will exclude everything, but that may defeat the purpose.

  If the current directory were the default, and on first run an error message like "Please include files first" appeared--and users also must enter "Y" at a disclaimer message--users could explicitly opt in instead.

  [1] https://devenv.sh/blog/2025/02/13/devenv-14-generating-nix-d...

  [2] https://github.com/cachix/devenv/blob/main/devenv/src/cli.rs...

• Easy development environments with Nix and Nix flakes!
  9 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2025

  If writing a devshell on your own seems more complicated than necessary, you can use tools like Devenv or Devbox (by the same team that built NixHub), which are both built on Nix. Devenv provides nice wrappers to automatically add languages, services (like postgres or redis), etc. on top of your flake, without having to do the shenanigans we had to do with Valkey. Devbox on the other hand, lets you skip writing Nix entirely, since they have their own CLI and lock file that pull packages from nixpkgs.

• Mise: Dev tools, env vars, task runner
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2024
• Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2024

  I've just tried both `devenv` and `flox`, and the latter had two related niceties:

  - Direnv wants to put its config inside the root of a git repo, which makes it hard to ignore. Flox's config is all in a `.flox` directory, so I could `echo * >> .flox/.gitignore` in any repo without changing the repo's gitignore.

  - There seems to be no way to run `direnv` on an environment that's not the current working dir, see https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67.

  OTOH, `flox` was a bit harder to install in an existing nix setup, at least if I wanted to do a cached install. You can follow the instructions in https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6, or you could add yourself to Nix's "trusted users" (which makes sense only if you're the only user on the computer using Nix).

• Devenv – Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2024
• An Introduction to Nix for Ruby Developers
  8 projects | dev.to | 21 Aug 2024

  devenv.sh merits exploration too. It is something of a hybrid, with a JSON-like programming language, YAML configuration, and Docker-like composition of services.

• Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2024

  We've been building https://devenv.sh for that reason, I expect more companies to go back to local development once they see DX has improved locally.

• Switching from Arch to NixOS
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jul 2024

  I'm of the mindset that NixOS is too much, all at once. I understand the power of the Nix ecosystem, but the barrier of entry remains too high to enter.

  I've switched to using devenv[1] as a first step. This at least allows me to experiment with using nix to configure my dev environment in a per directory fashion, while allowing me to use the Linux distro of my choice.

  [1]: https://github.com/cachix/devenv

• The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jul 2024

  It would be bring less complexity using https://devenv.sh/ to provide the tooling :-)

• Python Has Too Many Package Managers
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2024

  If you haven't yet, check out https://devenv.sh. It's pretty nice for python packages and installs your requirements to a project local venv for you via whatever tool you want (pip, poetry, uv etc).

  I've been using it for a couple of years and it's super nice to be able to manage both python and "native" dependencies, and other non-python development tools all together.

  I used just nix and whatever python packages are already in nixpkgs for several projects. And that works really really well until you run into an issue with compatibility like I did. It seems to mostly happen when some extremely common tool like `awscli2` depends on a specific version of some package and so it's pinned.

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