README.md

mimvoid's little nix shells

My personal collection of nix shell files for temporary packages, shell functions, and configuration files.

Why?

There are certain tools I use repeatedly, but rarely enough that I don't want to keep them in my user environment. For some, I may want settings and aliases that a simple nix-shell or nix shell command cannot provide.

The solution? Nix can use shell.nix files and devShells to symlink files and specify shell hooks. This repo is a collection of these files.

Note

These shells are for my personal use cases. While I may listen to requests, this repository will likely be rather opinionated.

I welcome anyone to create their own repo based on these files!

Usage

The shells can be entered with or without flakes.

With Flakes

At the root directory, use nix develop followed by the shell to enter. The names of the devShells can be found in flake.nix.

Example:

flake.nix

{
  # ... other file contents ...

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs }:
    # ...
    devShells = forAllSystems ({ pkgs }: {
      "hello" = import ./hello/shell.nix { inherit pkgs; };
    });
  };
}

$ nix develop .#hello

To use a shell other than bash, you can do something like:

$ nix develop .#hello --command zsh

With nix-shell

Enter the directory with the shell.nix file you want to use, and do nix-shell.

Example:

$ cd hello
$ nix-shell

Making Nix Shells

Aliases

Nix's shellHook can provide aliases, but since devShells are made in bash, writing aliases in shellHook does not work for shells like zsh.

This is especially a problem if one uses direnv (e.g. with nix-direnv), which automatically drops you into your current shell.

However, there is a workaround: pkgs.writeShellScriptBin. This is a trivial builder that writes a script file to /nix/store/<store path>/bin/<file>, and if included in the shell's packages list, can be made available and executable for the user.

This repo stores these scripts in a set whose leaves can be included separately in the shell's packages list.

Example:

shell.nix

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:
let
  aliases = {
    uwu-hello = pkgs.writeShellScriptBin "uwu-hello"
      ''
        hello -g "hewwo?"
      '';

    custom-hello = pkgs.writeShellScriptBin "uwu-hello"
      ''
        hello -g "$@"
      '';
  };
in
pkgs.mkShell {
  packages = with pkgs; [
    hello
    aliases.custom-hello
  ];
}

In the shell, custom-hello "hi" does hello -g "hi", but uwu-hello is not a command.

Configuration files

shellHook can symlink existing files to the specified location. For simplicity's sake, that is what I do in this repo.

Alternatively, you can write something like this:

shell.nix

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:

pkgs.mkShell {
  # ...

  shellHook =
    let
      config_file = builtins.toFile "config.toml"
        ''
          foo = "bar"

          [baz]
          hello = 1
        '';
    in
    ''
      ln -s ${config_file} ~/.config/example/config.toml
    '';
}

Or use the variations of pkgs.writeTextFile, pkgs.writeText, etc.