[ikety]

Recently went from using devcontainers to nix-shell. But in every new project I include instructions for both nix-shell + direnv as well as dev containers, so people can fully ignore nix if they choose.

A form of this which mixes devcontainer and nix might be the holy grail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpBXrsVg83Y&t=941s

Positives

- You lean on the power of dev containers while still using a portable spec

- You get access to nixpkgs which is arguably the most exhaustive package library

- You get the "true reproducibility" of nix over docker

Negatives

- Docker remains the king for ephemeral databases, more convoluted to manage with nix

[ossusermivami]

I use devenv.sh and generate oci containers out of it, which give me kinda the best of both worlds!

(nobody in my team use vscode or devcontainers but enjoy using docker)

[ikety]

This is old, but wondering if you had any publicly available project setup this way. Thanks

[Yanael]

Nix sounds like a great fit as well, but my experience with it has not been that great, and I feel it is not ideal for Python. I recently gave Flox a try, which simplifies the use of Nix. I use it from time to time, but it has not yet replaced my development environment.

In your case, is maintaining 2 dev env not annoying?

[ikety]

Sorry late reply,

Yes it is annoying to maintain 2 separate environments, but it's also not my end goal. A perfect solution for me would be a spec that is IDE agnostic, but also works as a VSCode dev container, all from a common source.

Maybe it's an unrealistic goal. But I've actually enjoyed trying and failing with nix so far, so it hasn't been too much of a burden.