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Comment by zephraph | Hacker News Reader

I'm really bullish on mise as a tool. It's quickly become one of my goto tools when starting a new project. Being able to have one config file to manage tools (node, python, rust, go, etc) as well as a simple makefile replacement makes it incredibly convenient. I pretty much always setup a `postinstall` hook so all someone has to do is `mise install` one of my projects and they'll get all the correct tool versions as well as having dependencies installed (like running `npm install`) automatically.

I feel it's significantly more practical than something like nix which feels like it has a steep learning curve.

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There's a tool that makes the Nix way a lot more approachable: https://devenv.sh/

e.g. `languages.rust.enable = true` and you're off to the races. You can add scripts, tasks, other packages, etc

Another Nix based alternative.. https://flox.dev/

Any hands on experience using it? I’ve looked at both this and devenv but have some level of reluctance to go with an opinionated wrapper like these as I feel like the second you need to do anything outside of the bounds of what they allow you to do you’re back in regular Nix land anyway

I've been using flox for around a year and have been pretty happy with it. It's had a few growing pains, but overall has been very reliable. I adopted it as I wanted something to install up to date development tools on top of my OS (Debian stable) and looked at flox and devenv, I went with flox as it supported zsh, which devenv didn't at the time.

I only have a few CLI/TUI programs installed with it, I try to keep it to a minimum. Just my editor, several language servers, AI tools and some other VM/container tooling. I haven't needed to break out of the happy path with it as of yet. I follow Nix progress with hopes of it eventually maturing into something better to use directly, but given the current state I prefer the wrappers at this point.

Having started with Mise, and now being primarily a Nix user — Mise still has the edge for what it does. It supports pinning exact versions of many more languages than devenv does. When devenv doesn't support pinning the version you need, it's straight back to the pain and complexity of overlays and overrides and so on.

I’ve been using devenv for about 6 months now. I’ve started new projects with it and migrated old ones to use it as well. I’ve also set up my org’s repositories with it. Onboarding devs to projects is simple. All everyone needs on their local machine is git, nix, and devenv. Bonus points for using it with direnv for automatic shell activation when you enter a directory. Direnv allows for IDE integrations as well for project dependencies.

Would you be willing to share an example setup?

Sounds very interesting - I've been using just & docker (-compose) to manage my monorepo projects after a short frustrating stint with moon&proto. I like the simplicity of just, but onboarding can still be cumbersome, especially across platforms.

A mise postinstall hook?

What do you put in it?

In the mise.toml

https://mise.jdx.dev/hooks.html

An example from one of our monorepo's ansible directories:

    [hooks]
    postinstall = [
        "uv sync",
        "ansible-galaxy role install -r ansible/requirements.yml",
        "ansible-galaxy collection install -r ansible/requirements.yml",
    ]

So following a `mise install`, the user also gets all the needed python packages installed via uv, and also all the galaxy roles/collections installed

Love it - great idea

yes! I set up a new project with mise. It makes it so much easier for new people to get started without having to do a bunch of manual steps. Awesome tool.

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