I usually write a script that idempotently spins these things up locally, and use the shellHook to call that script. That way whenever I cd into the dir the fir

I usually write a script that idempotently spins these things up locally, and use the shellHook to call that script. That way whenever I cd into the dir the first time, direnv loads the nix-shell, which starts the db, message broker, etc. I also have a shutdown script that I run when I manually want to shut things down. Works quite well. For more advanced use cases, such as k8s with tons of services, you're better off using something like tilt.dev.