Although I’ve never committed to using nix system-wide, I do enjoy nix-based using https://devenv.sh/ for the very reasons described in the article. It’s much easier than local containers for development.

▲ foldr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never really understood how version pinning is meant to work with devenv.sh or Nix more generally. If I whack a .tool-versions file in my repo, everyone who works on it can use install the exact same versions of the relevant tools using asdf. That's low tech and imperfect (and certainly not a replacement for all of Nix's features), but it works as far as it goes. None of the examples on the devenv.sh page demonstrate pinning of tools/packages to specific versions.

As best I can tell, Nix enthusiasts think that this is an XY problem and that I shouldn't want to pin individual tools/packages to arbitrary versions. But the thing is that I am a rude barbarian who very much does want to do this, however philosophically misguided it might be.

▲

malmeloo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you use the flake system (which is technically still experimental, but everyone is already using it anyway), all your flake 'inputs' are automatically pinned in a flake.lock file that can be committed to git for reproducibility. So if you add nixpkgs as a flake input, your nix expressions will always be referring to the same exact package versions until you update the lock file.

The downside is that flake inputs refer to other flakes, not individual packages, so if you update the nixpkgs input it will upgrade all of your packages at once. For some packages such as Python, nixpkgs tracks multiple major versions so you can loosely pin to that version. You can also include nixpkgs as an input multiple times under different git tags/commits and only use that input for some of your packages to effectively pin them. You could keep using one nixpkgs but override the package's source to build it for a specific version/commit, but this setup could break in the future, because the derivation (and therefore build instructions) will keep evolving while your package's version will not. Or, if you really wanted to, you could straight up just copy the derivation from nixpkgs into your local repository and use that instead.

Nix is quite flexible so there's more options than just these, it just takes a little getting used to to find out what's possible. I don't use devenv myself, but some quick googling reveals it works just fine with flakes, so I would try that to see if it suits your needs.

	▲	foldr 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, but I guess a more concrete version of my question is the following: > How do I set up my development environment using devenv.sh to pin nodejs to 24.14.0? If I understand your response correctly, I can't do this in any very practical way.

▲ ekropotin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hm. How it's different from home-manager?

	▲	shakow 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		home-manager manages your whole user's environment & desktop. devenv does not do any user-level change (you will not be able to make it configure your WM), but works at the directory level. For instance I'm currently working on a Rust + C++ project, and my devenv, whenever I enter this project folder: make CMake/g++/cargo/cbindgen available, enable a couple scripts to longer CMake invokations, set-up everything required for C++ and Rust LSPs, and create a couple git hooks to validate formatting etc.

▲ MuffinFlavored 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you help me understand why devenv is needed instead of a shell like this/what is gained?

    { pkgs }:
    
    pkgs.mkShell {
      nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
        # build tools
        cmake
        ninja
        gnumake
        pkg-config
      ];
    
      buildInputs = with pkgs; [
        # java
        jdk8
    
        # compilers
        gcc
        clang
        llvmPackages.libcxx
    
        # libraries
        capstone
        icu
        openssl_3
        libusb1
        libftdi
        zlib
    
        # scripting
        (python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [
          requests
          pyelftools
        ]))
      ];
    
      # capstone headers are in include/capstone/ but blutter expects include/
      shellHook = ''
        export CPATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPATH"
        export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH"
      '';
    }

	▲	shakow 38 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		“Needed” is too strong, but this does not provide services, does not provide project-specific scripts, does not setup LSP, does not setup git hooks, can't automatically dockerize your build, does not support multiple profiles (e.g. local and CI), etc.
	▲	nehalem 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		To be honest, I don’t know. I just enjoy the simplicity of devenv. It’s the right amount of user friendly.
	▲	fermuch 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		devenv also has tasks/services. For example you need to start redis, then your db, then seed it, and only then start the server. All of that could be aliases, yeah, but if you define them as aliases you can have them all up with `devenv up`. It even supports dependencies between tasks ("only run the db after migrations ran")

▲ catlover76 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]