3 ms·

How does it compare to devenv? I have used that for a couple of months and now the gotchas makes me look for an alternative.

sshine 2y ago
What are the gotchas? I’ve used Nix for 6 months, and it beats Devcontainers at a higher cost, but with less IDE lock-in. Devenv, as far as I understand, is a convenience layer on top of Nix. Just as Flox is.
- pierrebeucher 2y ago
  Wouldn't have said better, devenv and Flox are indeed similar and both uses Nix packages. We can say they are different frontends to the same set of packages, with slightly different features. Both are great in my opinion.
  - sshine 2y ago
    So what are the gotchas?
    - ilyagr 2y ago
      I've just tried both `devenv` and `flox`, and the latter had two related niceties: - Direnv wants to put its config inside the root of a git repo, which makes it hard to ignore. Flox's config is all in a `.flox` directory, so I could `echo * >> .flox/.gitignore` in any repo without changing the repo's gitignore. - There seems to be no way to run `direnv` on an environment that's not the current working dir, see https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67 https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67. OTOH, `flox` was a bit harder to install in an existing nix setup and requires trusting their cache, at least if I wanted to do a cached install. You can follow the instructions in https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6 https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6, or you could add yourself to Nix's "trusted users" (which makes sense only if you're the only user on the computer using Nix). See also https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1179 https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1179.
whoomp12342 2y ago
it says in the article: Easier to use and providing less friction than Dev Containers
- tidbeck 2y ago
  https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ and Dev Containers are not the same thing.

3 ms·

How does it compare to devenv? I have used that for a couple of months and now the gotchas makes me look for an alternative.

by zero0529 2y ago

sshine 2y ago
What are the gotchas? I’ve used Nix for 6 months, and it beats Devcontainers at a higher cost, but with less IDE lock-in. Devenv, as far as I understand, is a convenience layer on top of Nix. Just as Flox is.
- pierrebeucher 2y ago
  Wouldn't have said better, devenv and Flox are indeed similar and both uses Nix packages. We can say they are different frontends to the same set of packages, with slightly different features. Both are great in my opinion.
  - sshine 2y ago
    So what are the gotchas?
    - ilyagr 2y ago
      I've just tried both `devenv` and `flox`, and the latter had two related niceties: - Direnv wants to put its config inside the root of a git repo, which makes it hard to ignore. Flox's config is all in a `.flox` directory, so I could `echo * >> .flox/.gitignore` in any repo without changing the repo's gitignore. - There seems to be no way to run `direnv` on an environment that's not the current working dir, see https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67 https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues/67. OTOH, `flox` was a bit harder to install in an existing nix setup and requires trusting their cache, at least if I wanted to do a cached install. You can follow the instructions in https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6 https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6, or you could add yourself to Nix's "trusted users" (which makes sense only if you're the only user on the computer using Nix). See also https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1179 https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1179.
whoomp12342 2y ago
it says in the article: Easier to use and providing less friction than Dev Containers
- tidbeck 2y ago
  https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ and Dev Containers are not the same thing.