I would rather have a Nix devShell.
Is there a good solution for devshell with associated services? The app itself is fine that way, but what about the database, message queue, seed data, etc.?
You can install any services in your nix dev shell environment. Run them however you desire--a bash script that backgrounds their tasks, systemd user services, supervisord, or any other process manager.
edit: A really simple and effective process manager is foreman and its procfile format. I like the golang version of it (simple single binary with zero dependencies): https://github.com/ddollar/forego or https://github.com/mattn/goreman