Devbox will give you the same project environment (packages, env-vars) on your work and home laptop. It leverages nix, and uses your native file-system avoiding the overhead and complexity of using Docker.
yikes! thanks for pointing that out. The blog's renderer is confused too and renders the `#cowsay -- flakes are neat` as a comment.
To explain what's happening:
- The example above is running `nix run <flake output attribute> -- <arguments to pass to the flake output's binary>`.
- The `<flake output attribute>` here is `.#cowsay`, which is to be read as: `<flake reference>#<attribute path>`. The # is a separator here.
- The `<flake reference>` being `.` implies its a local flake at the current directory.
The `<attribute path>` in this case is the output from the flake i.e. the `cowsay` program.
As a meta-comment, yeah, this is kinda non-trivial for most of us. This is why we build devbox which provides a more familiar UX like `devbox add cowsay && devbox run -- cowsay "flakes are neat"`
I think this is a great strength of flakes. Packaging an application can sometimes have nuances that external folks may not be fully aware of and so having the packaging instructions (i.e. flake.nix) defined in the core repository can narrow that knowledge gap.
The title is simply literally the question that I was thinking about a few months ago when working on Devbox, and wrote a version of this post internally to answer the question for myself!
Ah, that's good to know :) It is just that I was expecting to read about some breaking news; that I missed that Nix deprecated channels or something! It is indeed a nice article explaining Flakes in general. Maybe "Why did Nix introduce Flakes?" might be a slightly better title for people coming with prior expectations like I did?
There is a very good presentation on the Case for Electronic Cash by Jerry Brito of the Coin Center non-profit. I highly recommend people watch it to understand why cash is important to preserve an open, liberal society.
