A Declarative environment with Nix

Package managers

• OS-level: brew, dnf, apt, yum, chocolatey, etc
• Versioning one per runtime: nvm, asdf, rvm, etc
• Per language: go deps, bundler, mix/hex, npm, composer, pip, etc
• Virtual environments: venv

What do we use them for ?

Make an environment for our programs to work !

What do we need ?

• Dependency graph
• Environment
• Services

Reproducible + Repeatable + Easy to change (rollback)

Define all input

• Clean environment (chroot)
• Explicit input
• Full dependency definition
• Symlink results

How does Nix work

• Download the packages in /nix/store, versionned
• Define your environment with code
• Generate a list of packages in your environment
• symlink them
• Keep track of generations, to allow to change the environment easily

Mac
Linux
NixOS

NixPkgs
all you need

Nix-shell

Nix for development environments

• Create a shell.nix file
• define your environment packages and variables
• nix-shell
• Done

https://nixos.org/nix/
https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/
 

Learning

Future Ideas

• Adopt for dev environment ?
• Reproducible test and build environement
• Docker with better caching = faster builds
• Deployment and full control of the deployed boxes
• Your idea !

Thank you !

Questions ?