Nix environments

Before you begin, ensure you have Nix (opens in a new tab) installed on your system. Nix is used for package management and to provide a consistent development environment. To install run the following command:

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

and follow the instructions.

$ nix --version
nix (Nix) 2.18.1

Make sure to enable Nix Flakes (opens in a new tab) by editing either ~/.config/nix/nix.conf or /etc/nix/nix.conf on your machine and add the following configuration entries:

experimental-features = nix-command flakes ca-derivations
allow-import-from-derivation = true

Optionally, to improve build speed, it is possible to set up binary caches maintained by IOHK and Plutonomicon by setting additional configuration entries:

substituters = https://cache.nixos.org https://iohk.cachix.org https://cache.iog.io
trusted-public-keys = cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY= hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo=

To facilitate seamlessly moving between directories and associated Nix development shells we use direnv (opens in a new tab) and nix-direnv (opens in a new tab):

Your shell and editors should pick up on the .envrc files in different directories and prepare the environment accordingly. Use direnv allow to enable the direnv environment and direnv reload to reload it when necessary. Otherwise, the .envrc file contains a proper Nix target you can use with the nix develop command.

To install both using nixpkgs:

nix profile install nixpkgs#direnv
nix profile install nixpkgs#nix-direnv