devshells

Development shells powered by Nix

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Nix: A purely functional package manager and language

Install Nix

You can follow the instructions for installing Nix from their documentation online.

⚠️ For the typical security reasons, I would suggest that you downloading the script first, validate it looks correct, and then execute it via the shell.

curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install > nix-install.sh
echo "2a1d16068a7c8fa835faf721b16fda1b5279f47f90d785aec7fa9e795d827a31 nix-install.sh" | sha256sum -c"
less nix-install.sh
sh nix-install.sh

Install devshells

The devshells repository is directly referencable by Nix, and if you already have SSH keys configured this will be the easiest way to get started.

You can clone this to a local directory, or reference the repo on GitHub.

# from a local directory
cd
git clone git@github.com:tcarrio/devshells.git
nix develop ~/devshells#php82

# or from Git directly
nix develop "git+ssh://git@github.com:/tcarrio/devshells#$target"

This will drop you into a Bash shell for the project. We will discuss the $target value next. You can also specify to use zsh with the following command:

nix develop ... --command zsh

⚠️ Keep in mind that zsh will source the ~/.zshrc file, which could unintentionally break your Nix environment!

Specifying targets

There are multiple targets available. Targets are meant to provide dev shells for specific projects or for general purposes. The following targets are defined:

• node: for general NodeJS development, includes NodeJS, Yarn, pnpm, and Python (native compilation support for modules like node-sass)
• php##: for general PHP development, versioning by PHP. v7.4 being EOL requires compilation, whereas the other PHP versions have binary caches available for arm64 and amd64.
  • php74: includes PHP 7.4 and composer
  • php80: includes PHP 8.0 and composer
  • php81: includes PHP 8.1 and composer
  • php82: includes PHP 8.2 and composer
• python: for general Python development

To start a specific target's dev shell, such as PHP 8.1, run the command:

nix develop ~/devshells#php81

# or from the repository reference

nix develop "git+ssh://git@github.com:/tcarrio/devshells#php81"

Convenient Access

You could also generate aliases or a helper function in your shell's config file:

function devshells() {
    if [ -n "$1" ]; then
        nix develop "git+ssh://git@github.com:/tcarrio/devshells#$1"
    else
        echo "You must provide a target shell"
    fi
}