Using Devbox

Growing older to me means I want to spend even more time fiddling with my development workflows…

My laptop is my temple—I don’t want to pollute it every time I brew install .... I’ve tried virtualenvs, Dockerfiles, virtual machines, you name it. So naturally, when my old coworker was raving about Nix, I wanted to try it out. And of course, I don’t have the time or attention span to devote myself to learning Nix deeply, so I looked for a shortcut and landed on devbox.

Here’s an example devbox.json configuration I used when working on this very website. It installs everything needed for me to run hugo server….feels similar to a dockerfile.

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jetify-com/devbox/0.14.2/.schema/devbox.schema.json",
  "packages": [
    "[email protected]",
    "hugo"
  ],
  "env": {                                                          
    "GOPATH": "$DEVBOX_PROJECT_ROOT/.go",
    "GOMODCACHE": "$DEVBOX_PROJECT_ROOT/.go/pkg/mod",
    "GOCACHE": "$DEVBOX_PROJECT_ROOT/.go/gocache"                                   
  },
  "shell": {
    "init_hook": [
      "hugo mod get -u github.com/jpanther/congo/v2"
    ]
  }
}

Turns out, having isolated dev environments for all my throwaway projects really does scratch the itch of keeping things neat and tidy. More importantly, it makes me feel like a hipster 😉.

I even went as far as to put an empty, unmodifiable ~/go file on my system… that central dumping ground has always put me on edge a bit, so it’s nice to never have to worry about that again.

In doing so, I learned that vscode uses ~/go when it installs go tools, so I had to modify that for all my projects:

settings.json (for vscode)

{
    // override so we don't use GOPATH and accidentally clutter up home dir
    "go.toolsGopath": "${workspaceFolder}/.go",
}

There’s enough boilerplate overall that I made a Github template repo for it, https://github.com/jcosentino11/go-project-template.

The main drawback I’ve run into with devbox is being limited by whatever package versions are available on nix. Golang, for example, is behind a minor version at the time of writing. Since I’m using this just for my personal use, it doesn’t bother me all that much.