Cosinder migrating to devbox

[Toraja]

Summary

• Investigate that devbox can be used instead of docker container.

What I did

• Install devbox

  curl -fsSL https://get.jetpack.io/devbox | bash

  • Also install nix (prompted by the devbox installation)
• Create directories for devbox and cd into it.
• Create devbox.json.
  • Taken from example
  • If you want to build your environment from scratch, run devbox init and it creates minimal devbox.json.
• Play around

What I found

• Similar to docker, it can create isolated development environments.
• But unlike docker, it does not use container. The below is a list of what I found differ from docker.
  • File system is shared, so file created inside devbox shell is visible outside.
  • Command line history is shared, so all commands run inside devbox shell appear in the history of parent shell.
  • Insatlled packages are shared unless installed via devbox add.
  • If git is installed using apt install, then git will be available in the parnet shell as well.
• Because it uses nix package manager to install specified dependencies, latest version is not necessarily available.
  • You need to install by running shell inside shell section of devbox.json
  • Looks like there is WIP to install specific version.
  • (Github Issue)

Pros and Cons

Pros

• No need to build image for each environment, and remember the complex hierarchy of image dependencies.
  • You still need base image to make host environment clean though.
  • Goodbye to complicated Makefile

Cons

• File system and command line history are not separated.
  • You can spin up separate container from base image for each environment.
• Latest version is not available.

Conclusion

Maybe devbox can be used if it supports installing packages other method than nix.