A reproducable development environment.
This repository was inspired by a number of videos and articles around managing dotfiles using a remote repo and discovering the benefits of using a (to me) new package manager - Nix.
The always-there enticing prospect of a new laptop or computer brings with it the opportunity for me to always think "Can I do any better?" when I set things up. Can I create the perfect development environment?
In this never-end quest for perfection, I stumbled upon Nix, a cross-platform package manage that promises reproducable and reliable dependencies. If you want to learn more about what Nix does, particularly if you like deep-diving into how something works then I highly recommend this article.
Nix offers a feature, combined with an add-on package direnv, that particularly excited me - cd into a directory on your machine and Nix creates a new shell evironment with all your dev dependencies loaded in, isolated from the rest of your system. No virtual machines, no Docker containers to spin up, just an isolated, and automated, build environment right where you need it.
In order to make the installation as easy as possible on a vanilla Linux or Mac system, the only requirement is being able to download and run the install.sh script from this repo.
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simondeeley/.dotfiles/main/install.sh | zshIf you copied and pasted the above script into a posix-compatiable shell it should download and install all the necessary plugins and configurations necessary.
I use Nix as a package manager and GNU Stow to manage dotfiles. Stow creates symlinks to various config and dotfiles that are managed in this git repo.
I recommend you clone this repo and modify the config files to your own liking. You can add or remove plugins as you see fit too.