If you are still writing development environment setup instruction for your project, time to use Nix!
With Nix:
- Any developers and CI systems can have reproducible builds and deployments regardless of the platforms (any Linux, MacOS or even Windows using WSL2) they use, thanks to Nix: the package manager.
- You can access a large collection of packages (over 80,000 as of today) maintained by thousands of contributors, thanks to Nixpkgs.
- There is even a dedicated Linux distribution using Nixpkgs: NixOS.
More over, you should use Nix Flakes. This upcoming new feature of Nix will power-up your build environment with a lock file that is similar to your yarn.lock/package-json.lock/Cargo.lock/etc., but for all types of projects.
It is a experience changer for many engineering organizations, e.g. at shopify.
Personally, each time I want to contribute to an open source project, the first thing I would do is to add a flake.nix to their project and decorate their CONTRIBUTING.md with a much more concise development environment setup using Nix section.
For more reasons why you should use Nix, I recommend these readings:
After you are “nix pilled” inevitably, Nix official website has a pretty decent collection of learning materials from getting started to comprehensive references.
There are also some good materials done by the community:
Further more, Nix Flakes have also its own interesting materials to read:
- Serokell: Practical Nix Flakes
- TWEAG: Nix Flakes, by Eelco Dolstra. (Eelco Dolstra wrote the paper about Nix in 2004)
Happy Nix!
Originally published at http://miaozc.me.
