<story><title>Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers</title><url>https://blog.replit.com/super-colliding-nix-stores</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterldowns</author><text>I think the best part about Nix is that it makes it super easy to get software into your development environment. This layered store is a pretty cool setup to make that efficient for Replit.&lt;p&gt;Not sure how if Nix&amp;#x2F;Replit has the program you’re looking for? Or what package name to use to actually get the program you want? Check out my cli search tool:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;peterldowns&amp;#x2F;nix-search-cli&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;peterldowns&amp;#x2F;nix-search-cli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I can’t help myself from ranting, it’s insane that I had to write this tool. Speaks to the lack of user focus in the Nix community. Even the blog post here doesn’t mention how to actually find packages to install!&lt;p&gt;What good is a package manager that makes finding packages difficult? Who should be expected to tolerate such a thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jljljl</author><text>Finding a specific version of a package is also really difficult. It requires you to find the commit hash in the Nixpkgs repo that last contained it, and there isn&amp;#x27;t a central search engine that lets you map version to commit.&lt;p&gt;We ended up building package version search into the Devbox CLI for this reason (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetpack.io&amp;#x2F;devbox&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;pinning_packages&amp;#x2F;#searching-for-available-packages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetpack.io&amp;#x2F;devbox&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;pinning_packages&amp;#x2F;#...&lt;/a&gt;). There&amp;#x27;s also a 3rd party site that lets you search for Nix package versions (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lazamar.co.uk&amp;#x2F;nix-versions&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lazamar.co.uk&amp;#x2F;nix-versions&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>
<story><title>Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers</title><url>https://blog.replit.com/super-colliding-nix-stores</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterldowns</author><text>I think the best part about Nix is that it makes it super easy to get software into your development environment. This layered store is a pretty cool setup to make that efficient for Replit.&lt;p&gt;Not sure how if Nix&amp;#x2F;Replit has the program you’re looking for? Or what package name to use to actually get the program you want? Check out my cli search tool:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;peterldowns&amp;#x2F;nix-search-cli&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;peterldowns&amp;#x2F;nix-search-cli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I can’t help myself from ranting, it’s insane that I had to write this tool. Speaks to the lack of user focus in the Nix community. Even the blog post here doesn’t mention how to actually find packages to install!&lt;p&gt;What good is a package manager that makes finding packages difficult? Who should be expected to tolerate such a thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghuntley</author><text>or &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;search.nixos.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;search.nixos.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;if folks want a easy (and good way) to get up and running in the nix ecosystem w&amp;#x2F;services ala replace docker compose then &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;devenv.sh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;devenv.sh&lt;/a&gt; is the shizz</text></comment>