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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

There are several tools in this space now- nix is maturing and people are realizing how useful nix can be for dev envs.

  * [devenv](devenv.sh) - I am using it and loving it, but worried that the development is not moving forward
  * [devbox](https://www.jetpack.io/devbox)
  * [daytona](https://www.daytona.io/docs/usage/workspaces/) 
  * [devshell](https://github.com/numtide/devshell)
  * [bob.build](bob.build) more focused on the build

I am glad that flox is pushing its development forward. Does flox have a way to run services? With `devenv` I run my database with `devenv up`.

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Not nix based, but I really like https://github.com/jdx/mise too to manage dev tools.

It’s a modern version of https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf written in Rust.

Formerly known as `rtx`

> but worried that the development is not moving forward

There is an open v1.0 PR: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/1005

Nix allows you to have a single lock file for all your dependencies. This is very useful for development environments. When you share a lock file via Git, then you know your colleagues will be running the same versions.

Devbox can also run services too. Both products use an awesome process runner called process-compose (https://github.com/f1bonacc1/process-compose/) which is worth checking out (it's even built with nix!)

I think the ability to run services is really what separates Devbox from other related Nix-based dev-env solutions.

Essentially taking what you get from the NixOS-specific configuration.nix options (like for example `services.mediawiki.enable = true`) and letting that be per-project, per-directory, is super useful.

I think Devbox's killer feature is trivially searching for and installing packages by version: https://www.jetpack.io/blog/how-nixhub-searches-nixpkgs/

+1 to devenv. I used to use Nix natively, then switched to devbox and then devenv. devenv is the most intuitive to use. I just wish that I could just run a command using devenv (similar to nix run) instead of having to declare it in the devenv.nix first.

I use devenv with flakes. That allows me to use standard Nix commands including nix run.

Great list.

Using devbox myself and very happy with it.

Would be great to hear what separates flox from the rest.

I have used devbox and have been keeping an eye on other options. Haven't tried devenv yet. Any thoughts on devenv vs flox given what we're seeing here?

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