There is no need to literally fork the nixpkgs repo. Most language derivations were written with the idea of supporting multiple versions at the same time. In this guide (https://www.breakds.org/post/nix-shell-for-nodejs), the key example is this one:
let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
buildNodejs = pkgs.callPackage <nixpkgs/pkgs/development/web/nodejs/nodejs.nix> {};
nodejs-8 = buildNodejs {
enableNpm = true; # We need npm, do we?
version = "8.17.0";
sha256 = "1zzn7s9wpz1cr4vzrr8n6l1mvg6gdvcfm6f24h1ky9rb93drc3av";
};
in pkgs.mkShell rec {
name = "webdev";
buildInputs = with pkgs; [
nodejs-8
(yarn.override { nodejs = nodejs-8; })
];
}
If the derivation hadn't been written to be reusable what you can do is to copy this whole directory https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/nixos-21.05/pkgs/devel... to your local project and import the nix files locally. In this case, some of the artifact might be missing from the nix cache and you might need to compile some from source. We do this in some cases and upload the artifacts to our private store on https://www.cachix.org so that no engineer has to recompile them again on their own computer.