I recently bought a Macbook because more and more people are asking me how touse Nix in certain situations under MacOS.In this article, we walk through installing Nix on MacOS and see how pleasantthe experience is these days.After that, we show how to go declarative on MacOS with nix-darwin to enablecompilation for Linux and Intel Macs, as well as some other nice features.
I’m new to Nix, it sounds interesting. In the past I’ve used tools like nvm, sdkman, pyenv, etc with some docker on the side to provide stuff I didn’t wanna install via homebrew. It worked but was a whole bunch of setup for new team members. I also am not really interested in going full docker or vm for dev because of the performance hit and the added complexity of volume management, port mapping, process juggling, logging, terminal access, etc… deploy to docker? Sure, but dev is a bit of a chore.
This seems like an interesting way to get real declarative environments without a ton of docker bootstrapping and without 15 separate version managers. I like the idea, I’m gonna try it out!
I was just thinking the same thing. Right now we use a combination of homebrew, docker, and asdf to manage dev envs, with mixed success. This could be a cool hack week project