3 ms·

I've had a headless nixos box installed for over a year now and enjoy using it, but trying to install python,ruby,node / gems / pypackages etc is extremely anno

I've had a headless nixos box installed for over a year now and enjoy using it, but trying to install python,ruby,node / gems / pypackages etc is extremely annoying. I've had endless problems when trying to just do something like create a virtualenv and get my deps installed to try something out of pypi etc. I'm aware of nix-shell, pypi2nix but many of the ruby / python packages I want aren't in the nixos-packages repo yet. I don't really want to debug / write some crazy nix recipes to just try and spin up a quick pyenv. Does anyone know if guix is easier to use in this regard? The syntax looks much saner, but I hear it has less support since it isn't as widely used.

ris 9y ago
> many of the ruby / python packages I want aren't in the nixos-packages repo yet They're not difficult to add. FWIW I've had virtualenvs working pretty well on Nix systems - simply provide the environment with the C-dependencies and `virtualenv` from the `pythonPackages` version you desire. Use that `virtualenv` to create your venv directory and you're pretty much away. Oh and you may have to set the `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` environment variable. Pretty much works for me. Having said that, the whole concept of virtualenvs and for that matter the whole python packaging ecosystem is a series of rather broken ideas.