Prev Source
Next Source

3. Explore Nix Development Environments

original source

The Nix CLI did a few things:

• It used the github:DeterminateSystems/zero-to-nix flake reference to pull in some Nix code and built a specific flake output (more on this later).
  
• It built the packages specified in the environment configuration (again, more on this later).
  
• It set up an environment with a PATH that enables the git and curl packages to be discovered in the Nix store.

While it’s fun to explore the environment, you don’t always want to be inside the environment to use it. The nix develop command provides a --command (or -c) flag that you can use to run commands that use the environment but from your current environment.

Nix development environments are hermetic in that they’re isolated from the surrounding environment (such as your environment variables and paths like /bin and /usr/bin).

direnv is a popular tool that automatically loads specific environment variables whenever you cd into a directory (and then unloads those variables when you cd out of the directory). The combination of direnv and Nix can be quite powerful, enabling you to automatically load Nix development environments whenever you navigate to a directory.

The flake.nix file defines the flake for your project.

The flake.lock pins all of the flake inputs—essentially the Nix dependencies—in your flake.nix file to specific Git revisions.

---

---

---

---