devshell

There is also devshell[1] which allows you to configure specific commands for your `env` and sits inside your flake. [1]: https://github.com/numtide/devshell

1. Editor - VS code (working mostly on Typescript projects these days) - Emacs for org mode / note taking - Jetbrains Rider for Game dev - nvim for, well, vi. 2. Build / Test / Deploy - My mac is completely managed by a Nix / home-manager[1] setup that delegates to homebrew for some apps. - I add a flake.nix to all projects and use the nix devShell[2] with direnv extension to create development environments with custom commands. I played with the flix language[3] (on JVM) briefly and my nix based workflow worked quite well. - I use lima with nerdctl[4] for containerization when required. I have a stalled experiment to use VSCode devcontainers[5]. I unfortunately didn't take notes on that experiment so I don't have a lot to share. All I can remember is that the integration to VSCode was quite impressive but trying to

The big thing this is going to miss between 2018 and now is that flakes have greatly increased presence. The small things are: - nix-direnv[1] is much more powerful and stable, with or without flakes - devshell[2] exists and is reasonably mature for those who want to give this to a team without teaching them (most) nix Still, apart from those, this is still a good intro. [1] https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv [2] https://github.com/numtide/devshell

To be clear, nix-shell --pure serves this use case by accident; it basically drops you into the shell with generic-builder.sh sourced and the build environment for a Nix derivation. This is useful for debugging Nix derivations, and if you are using mkShell you can minimize the pollution, but it's not exactly a development environment tailored for the typical software-engineering workflow. The tool that (ab)uses nix-shell/nix shell to get this right is devshell [1], which creates an activation script (similar to NixOS itself) that provides a real reproducible development env which works with shells other than bash. [1] https://github.com/numtide/devshell

For simple devshell environments, you probably don't need to write much Nix at all. You can use a tool like numtide/devshell [1] to create a flake from a template which lets you define packages and commands you want to expose via a TOML config file. [1] https://github.com/numtide/devshell/blob/master/docs/getting... The reason to use the Flake based version is that then it will automatically create a flake.lock file which should be added to version control so every user will use the same nixpkgs version. While you can build normal Dockerfiles using some Nix tools it would be the same as building the image from Docker directly. If you want the same package-pinning guarantees in Docker images, then you need to build a NixOS based image which will let you add Nix packages. The pkgs.dockerTools.buildLayeredImage and it's counterpart function