Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers

https://medium.com/@pierre_49652/flox-better-alternative-to-dev-containers-d02e1a2ec423

by pierrebeucher • 2 years ago

45 17 2 years ago

milliams• 2 years ago

Here's the project itself: https://github.com/flox/flox

zero0529• 2 years ago

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.

sshine2• 2 years 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.

pierrebeucher3• 2 years 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.

whoomp12342• 2 years ago

it says in the article:

Easier to use and providing less friction than Dev Containers

tidbeck• 2 years ago

https://devenv.sh/ and Dev Containers are not the same thing.

juliangmp• 2 years ago

Looks interesting, not that far from devenv I believe.

Though I do wonder, would we need those wrapper tools if vanilla nix was more intuitive to use...?

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 2 years ago

Short answer probably not. You can get most of the way there with nix + direnv. But nix is a complex beast even if you’re only using that little subset of it. I watched the development of this flox tool for a few months now, to me it seems closest to vanilla nix that still gives a nice UX. With devenv there seems to be more guardrails but also more proprietary flavor (the under the hood constructs are not entirely just raw nix)

pierrebeucher3• 2 years ago

I agree. Plain Nix is very complex but highly configurable and allow very complex use case, whereas Flox / devenv are much easier to setup but hide certain Nix features (which are probably not needed in most dev environments anyway, so it's totally worth it given the simpler interface)

dsab• 2 years ago

I am curious how the company behind Flox intends to make money, I hope they intend to make money on consulting or operate non-profit sponsored by some institutions.

pierrebeucher3• 2 years ago

From what I gather it's exactly this in reverse: they already were a consulting company providing development environment to teams as part of their package, and Flox is an internal tool they open-sourced. (interpreted from what I read on their about page: https://flox.dev/about/)

ronef• 2 years ago

Hey from Berlin! I'm Ron one of the founders at Flox and also board member of the NixOS Foundation. Just noticed folks are talking here and that's super exciting! We are all in the midst of the yearly NixCon so apologies if I'm slow to respond or my answers are a bit shorter. Definitely happy to dig deeper!

I saw your question and actually wanted to share the response I shared a few months ago, happy to unpack or talk about any of it as well.

This is from our original 1.0 announcement here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692801) -> bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it. What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise. Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.

legobeet• 2 years ago

In a similar vein but still containers and a bit more targeted: http://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv

I daily-drove NixOS for a few years and philosophically very much vibe with the foundational ideas. Gave up on it because it was too much involved in getting productive with writing and maintaining nix configurations.

zxilly• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder why Dev Containers is so slow. I've tried it on a project with a go, Python and nodejs toolchain, and pre-builds running on GitHub Actions usually take an hour and a half or more.

Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers

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