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Does Your Repo's Getting Started Section Take More Than 10 Minutes? Just Use Nix.

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Let’s first ask ourselves: What should the Getting Started section of a project look like?

Abstractly, I think it should be something like this:

  1. git clone <repo-name> && cd <repo-name>
  2. “Install the necessary dependencies”
  3. “Run the app as intended”

And well, we all know what it can look like—I won’t go into that here.

With a devShell from a Nix Flake, we can get to this: 0. (You probably need to install Nix first: )

Terminal window
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://artifacts.nixos.org/nix-installer | sh -s -- install
  1. git clone <repo-name> && cd <repo-name>
  2. nix develop
  3. “Run the app as intended”—if your flake.nix-Person did it right, nix develop should make clear how to do that.

And the best part? One person can setup this flake, once—and the ‘works on my machine’-days are gone.

That’s all I’ve got for today. See you tomorrow! 🚢 👋