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.

  • @yogsotothEnglish
    9•11 months ago

    nix does not need nixOS to run but is a complex package manager. At least for me, it doesn’t seem more complex than docker ecosystem.

    I personally use nix to take care of downloading compatible dependencies in isolation for me. And the rest of the code is really, just basic script shell or Makefile too.

    I also could add a fancy mergeShells function I have written in nix to support a docker-compose-like composition of nix-shell files. But you could go a very long way with nix before you even want to do something like this.