Services-flake Alternatives

services-flake reviews and mentions

• Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?
  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2026

  Well yes, but if you think you need docker-compose then you're looking for runtime control and not build time control, so you should use this nix flake: https://github.com/juspay/services-flake (which uses process-compose instead of docker-compose).

• A Decade of Docker Containers
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2026

  That's the one, although I tend to reference it through https://github.com/juspay/services-flake because that way I end up using the community-maintained configs for things like postgres or whatever.

  What process-compose gives me is a single parent with all of that project's processes as children, and a nice TUI for scrolling through them to see who is happy/unhappy, and interrogating their logs, and when I shut it down, all of that project's dependencies shut down. Pretty much the same flow as docker-compose.

  It's all self-contained so I can run it on MacOS and it'll behave just the same as on linux (I don't think systemd does this), and without requiring me to solve the docker/podman/rancher/orbstack problem (these are dependencies that are hard to bundle in nix, so while everything else comes for free, they come at the cost of complicating my readme with a bunch of requests that the user set things up beforehand.

  As a bonus, since it's a single parent process, if I decide to invoke it through libfaketime, the time inherited by subprocess so it's consistently faked in the database and the services and in observability tools...

  My feeling for systemd is that it's more for system-level dependencies and less for project-level dependencies. Like, if I have separate projects which need different versions of postgres, systemd commands aren't going to give me a natural way to keep track of which project's postgres I'm talking about. process-compose, however, will show me logs for the correct postgres (or whatever service) in these cases:

      ~/src/projA$ process-compose process logs postgres

• I Ditched Docker for Podman (and You Should Too)
  24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2025

  Or if you are on macOS, there is https://github.com/juspay/services-flake which is based on process-compose. So you get an unified alternative to docker-compose but based on Nix and works on both platforms.

• Mise: Dev tools, env vars, task runner
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2024

  > This is already a solved problem with Nix shell (except the task runner part)

  The task runner part is also solved in Nix. See

  https://github.com/Platonic-Systems/process-compose-flake

  and

  https://github.com/juspay/services-flake

• Testcontainers
  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024

  If your project uses Nix, checkout services-flake for running services via Nix.

  https://github.com/juspay/services-flake

  We actually do this in Nammayatri, an OSS project providing "Uber" for autos in India.

  https://github.com/nammayatri/nammayatri

  There is a services-flake module allowing you to spin the entire nammayatri stack (including postgres, redis, etc.) using a flake app. Similarly, there's one for running load test, which is also run in Jenkins CI.

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  www.saashub.com | 10 Jun 2026

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