Say Goodbye to Containers - Ephemeral Environments with Nix Shell

With Nix Shell, you can instantly spin up the exact environment you need, tailored to specific projects, and discard it with ease once you're done. No containers!

We'll walk you through the installation of Nix and various ways to craft custom environments with Nix Shell.

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#NixOS #NixShell #EphemeralEnvironments

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▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Intro to Ephemeral Environments
04:14 CastAI (Sponsor)
04:54 Ephemeral Shell Environments with Nix
14:31 Nix Pros and Cons

[DevOpsToolkit]

What do you think of Nix? Can it replace containers on your laptop (for tools, not apps)?

[arnabseal]

I'm loving the fact that someone is finally speaking about this! ❤

[wolfymaster]

Viktor - your use case is the exact same use case I have had teaching students and nix has become a foundation in the platform I am building. Love hearing your experience!

[SuperHeroINTJ]

Nix is amazing good. I have been using to synchronize all my 24 hosts, host K3s, and to generate containers. Yes! Nix generates containers that are equal bit by bit no matter in what environment. And in a declarative manner!

[Fabian-_-]

Nix is awesome, switched to NixOS on everything, doing local dev with Nix and custom modules, doing CI with Nix and Gitlab through a custom module, etc.
I want Nix everywhere, it's extremely nice as a developer to be able to configure and "program" everything, like writing custom modules etc.

[itssoaztek]

A video which addresses more Nix features would be awesome.

[SuperHeroINTJ]

Nix has it's own CI called Hydra for continuously building Nix packages. Hydra can upload to a S3 storage, then you consume Nix packages from binary cache (S3, etc). Hydra is a bit more clever when building packages because it sends individual packages to cache instead of doing full builds and only then sending to cache. This is helpful when having lots of builders building simultaneously. It is possible to re-use cache early. I'm unsure if Nix without Hydra does that too.

[conundrumu]

nice video. I've been using nixOS for a few months now and as a developer it simplifies my workflow significantly and for all of the languages and frameworks I use. no more worry about version conflicts. one thing I was going to mention about nix and build environments in containers, I would absolutely reduce the size of all ontainers by volume mounting the nix store.

[codingcocoon]

Finally, an explanation of Nix package manager that I can understand. Thank you so much for this video.

[lucianogs]

Thank you for the amazing video. Your ability to showcase the tool while teaching how to use it is truly a superpower!

[sharperguy]

There is a lot of work still to be done on making every development environment work well with Nix But the great thing is that once you get something setup and working, it is very easy to publish that code so others can use it too.

[dandogamer]

Wow this is insane! I do some contracting on the side and often have to download various software to work on different projects (I cant imagine how much random clutter I have rn), this can greatly simplify my workflow for different clients. Then once the project is done clean up is super simple!

[SeanCCosgrove]

At work we use nix flakes in each repo defining tools (and specific versions) required for deploying and working on what's in the repo, e.g. terragrunt, terraform, kubectl, etc. Overall it's been handy, We've considered moving to containers instead for that use case, but since it works it's not a high priority, and doubtless there are pain points we'd run into.

[ErnestGWilsonII]

❤ Wow, very nicely done and what a great find! I can tell you times when my world changed, VMWare, docker, lambda, python virtual environments, and now NIX shell!
This is indeed, a game changer, thank you for making this video and sharing it with all of us!
I am now subscribed to your channel with notifications, enabled, and of course, thumbs up!
Thank you,
Ernie in Pennsylvania

[snowke]

Very interesting. I really like that they are solving this problem. Thank you for sharing!

[scottscoble]

I was talking with my team about Nix right before this video went up. It's an incredible piece of tech. I'm exploring how to separate runtime dependencies and build artifacts using nix flakes; this might also make a good video. Well done.

[yol]

Also kinda nice to use the nix dockertools to build your container images.

[starrwulfe]

Nix makes it totally easy to make portable OS agnostic development environments everywhere as well. I have a folder where I'm teaching myself GoLang by building a web CMS app/framework and I can use my Mac or Windows (running WSL) or even in a NixOS VM. So whenever I have some free time, Just pop into one of the environments, do a git sync, tinker and code, git sync and done!

[IvanRizzante]

Thanks for another great video! Generally speaking I find this approach good whenever you want to have your tools with you to do something ephemeral, the CrossPlane course example is nicely fitting here. In that case the container approach may be overkilling.
I even think that there are similarities here with the container based approach, like you have to install nix on the host, you still have a local cache of what you install, and so on.
My preference still goes to containers whenever you're able to define a set of tools that you always use for some reason, for example when preparing a develoment environment.
Containers in my opinion are great to enable remote development with tecnologies I use, like devcontainers and DevPod.
Certainly I woudn't use them to run pipelines locally!

[BeyondTypeScript]

Amazing content! Thank you for sharing! I recently started exploring nix and I think this is pretty exciting for the reason you mentioned in the beginning - keep the mac virgin and lightweight. I am curious about mixing nix with tmux and nvim.