What does HackerNews think of devbox?
Instant, easy, and predictable development environments
Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.
Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.
Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.
We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.
See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.
One solution that my company is working on is Devbox, which tries to provide the usability of tools like Yarn or Brew with the reproducibility of Nix.
You can check us out at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox
We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox
> Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells for development
it uses nix, and they just added
`devbox global`
> Devbox Global allows you to add packages to a global devbox.json. This is useful for installing a standard set of tools you want to use across multiple Devbox Projects. You can also use Devbox Global to install and manage packages on your Host OS, as a substitute for tools like brew or apt-get.
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.
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!