An exciting exploration into the integration of Nix and a selection of diverse development tools into a standard project lifecycle.
- A reproducible development environment that doesn't rely on running virtual machines or containers.
- The ability to pin dependencies so that the same software is used from dev to production.
- The right tool for the job: combine several tools that do a singular thing well. Avoid abstractions!
Nix is used for two things:
- managing a devshell that contains (pinned) packages like PHP and Node
- building Docker images
This allows me to have a reproducible development environment that runs local, yet isolated + include those same packages into Docker images.
Devenv served as a great inspiration. I highly recommend checking it out!
Direnv is used to automatically start the devshell when you cd into the project dir, offering a more seamless experience. There's some custom stuff happening in .envrc that makes sure your environment is set up properly.
Overmind is a process manager that runs the tasks defined in the Procfile. Think docker compose, but without Docker.
PHP setups require a bit more work than building a static binary with Go. There's more weird stuff to figure out this way, making it more suitable for an experiment like this.