[foldr]

Ok, but I guess a more concrete version of my question is the following:

> How do I set up my development environment using devenv.sh to pin nodejs to 24.14.0?

If I understand your response correctly, I can't do this in any very practical way.

[JamesSwift]

Generally something like

  languages.javascript.enable = true
  languages.javascript.package = pkgs.nodejs_24

[Novosell]

24 != 24.14.0

[JamesSwift]

If you care about the _exact version you are pinning_ (even though you will guarantee the pin between team members without needing to do this step), you can either pin nixpkgs repo to the state that had that version, source the target version directly, or for some ecosystems (eg ruby) you can just specify a version with a number and it has tooling to resolve that using "traditional" approaches.

In general though when working on a team, you dont really care about the _exact semver version_, you care about the major and handle version bumps by bumping the pin of nix packages.

[foldr]

But that doesn’t pin to a specific version?

[oasisaimlessly]

It does, in combination with a pinned nixpkgs commit, which you can find like this:

    ~/repos/nixpkgs$ git log --grep='nodejs.* 24.14.0' -1 origin/master
    commit 9c0e2056b3c16190aafe67e4d29e530fc1f8c7c7
    Merge: d3a4e93b79c9 0873aea2d0da
    Date:   Tue Feb 24 16:53:40 2026 +0000
    
        nodejs_24: 24.13.1 -> 24.14.0 (#493691)
    ~/repos/nixpkgs$ nix eval nixpkgs/9c0e2056b3c16190aafe67e4d29e530fc1f8c7c7#nodejs_24.version
    "24.14.0"
    ~/repos/nixpkgs$

[JamesSwift]

It does, but its implicit (and so may not be the exact patch version you have in mind). See my other comment for how to handle if you _do actually care_ about pinning to a specific version explicitly.

[foldr]

Doesn't that pin me to a particular versions of nixpkgs? That's fine if I only care about nodejs, but if I want to maintain particular versions of different tools, it won't work.

[JamesSwift]

Again, generally in other systems the full semver pinning is more of a crutch to get some 'reproducibility' that nix gives you out of the box at a much higher level. So, in general, people just pin to the major version in nix. But if you _really_ want the full semver pinning there are multiple options that I lay out in the other post. You can even patch the _actual nodejs source itself_ in reproducible/version-pinned ways.

[foldr]

I do want exact version pinning of individual packages. (As I said in my initial post, I’m aware that Nix advocates think that I shouldn’t want this.)

I’m not sure what other post you’re referring to. There’s one where you describe some approaches in broad terms, but as far as what the relevant devenv.sh config would look like, I’m none the wiser.