devbox

Depending on your use case, devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) could be what you're looking for. It is powered by Nix, but abstracts the nix language away, so that you can use it like a "regular" package manager. Currently it works on a "per-project" basis, but we're planning to add support to use it as your primary package manager for global installs as well.

If you are looking for a simple interface that is an alternative to asdf, but uses Nix under the hood, you could check out Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox). Our goal is to make spinning up per-project dev environments easy and approachable, without having to write a full nix.flake.

How do you compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

Another take: DevBox provides 60% of the features of Docker while being faster and simpler. https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox It provides filesystem isolation -- it uses Nix under the covers. This is great if you're a dev and don't want to mess with routing ports across a hidden VM to the host, just run a command and your service appears directly on the host. DevBox allows very rapid development. And for production, it exports to Docker. You get the best of all worlds!

This is shelling out to nix-shell (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox/blob/97c19c370287e203bb...) which means that it will only support bash AFAIK. I've seen a lot of discussions around using nix-shell for dev environments, but read somewhere that is not really made for this purpose originally, rather for just building packages, bash being only one of the limitations. I tried to experiment myself with nix-shell, but I think it doesn't provide separation on the machine on which you run, it's not a chroot nor a docker container. If you are interested in some level of separation to make sure that a dev environment is "safe" to run on your machine without making side effects to things external to the project, then I'm not sure nix-shell would be able to help, but I would be happy to learn there is an option to do otherwise.

A nice porcelain for ad-hoc uses of good ol' `nix-shell`, it looks like: https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox/blob/main/nix/nix.go#L3... The container export functionality is based on BuildKit via the plain `docker buildx` CLI: https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox/blob/main/docker/docker... and it uses CUE to validate its configuration, which is JSON. All-in-all it actually looks extremely simple. I guess the basic idea is to give you access to a subset of the power of Nix and all the goodies in Nixpkgs without exposing you to the Nix language or the Nix CLI. Longstanding Nix users will probably not be super excited about this (though they might as well try it! it does look very nice to use). However, for folks who are put off by Nix's reputation for difficulty but might be tempted to enjoy freely drawing upon the 80,000+ software package

Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells and containers. You start by defining the list of packages required by your development environment, and devbox uses that definition to create an isolated environment just for your application. In practice, Devbox works similar to a package manager like yarn – except the packages it manages are at the operating-system level (the sort of thing you would normally install with brew or apt-get). See it in action: https://youtu.be/WMBaXQZmDoA