Earlier this month I mentioned on Mastodon that I was replacing a Docker-based local development environment at my day job with a Nix-based one, orchestrated with overmind and a justfile.
There was quite a lot of interest in particular in how overmind and just could be used to replace a container / compose-based local development.
While I can’t share the details of the significantly more complex migration I did at my day job (yet!
Some folks on the internet were interested in how I had managed to ditch Docker for local development. This is a slightly overdue write up on how I typically do things now with Nix, Overmind and Just.
Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?
Yep, sort of.
It saves each version of your dependencies to the /nix/store folder with a checksum prefixing the program name. For example you might have the following Firefox programs
Because of this you can largely avoid dependency conflicts. For example a program A could depend on /nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1 and a program B could depend on /nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1 and both programs would work as both have dependencies satisfied. AFAIK using other build systems you would have to break program A or program B (or find versions of program A and program B where both dependencies are satisfied).
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programming@programming.dev
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos
I’ll certainly give this a read!
Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?
Yep, sort of.
It saves each version of your dependencies to the /nix/store folder with a checksum prefixing the program name. For example you might have the following Firefox programs
Because of this you can largely avoid dependency conflicts. For example a program A could depend on
/nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1and a program B could depend on/nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1and both programs would work as both have dependencies satisfied. AFAIK using other build systems you would have to break program A or program B (or find versions of program A and program B where both dependencies are satisfied).