Instant, easy, and predictable development environments
What is it?
Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you
easily create isolated shells for development. You start by defining the list of
packages required by your development environment, and devbox uses that
definition to create an isolated environment just for your application.
In practice, Devbox works similar to a package manager like yarn – except the
packages it manages are at the operating-system level (the sort of thing you
would normally install with brew or apt-get). With Devbox, you can install
over 400,000 package versions from the Nix Package
Registry
Devbox was originally developed by Jetify and is
internally powered by nix.
Demo
The example below creates a development environment with python 3.10 and
go 1.18, even though those packages are not installed in the underlying
machine. You can run commands in the environment with devbox run, or start an
interactive shell in it with devbox shell:
Installing Devbox
Use the following install script to get the latest version of Devbox:
Declare the list of tools needed by your project via a devbox.json file and
run devbox shell. Everyone working on the project gets a shell environment
with the exact same version of those tools.
Try new tools without polluting your laptop
Development environments created by Devbox are isolated from everything else in
your laptop. Is there a tool you want to try without making a mess? Add it to a
Devbox shell, and remove it when you don't want it anymore – all while keeping
your laptop pristine.
Don't sacrifice speed
Devbox can create isolated environments right on your laptop, without an
extra-layer of virtualization slowing your file system or every command. When
you're ready to ship, it'll turn it into an equivalent container – but not
before.
Goodbye conflicting versions
Are you working on multiple projects, all of which need different versions of
the same binary? Instead of attempting to install conflicting versions of the
same binary on your laptop, create an isolated environment for each project, and
use whatever version you want for each.
Take your environment with you
Devbox's dev environments are portable. We make it possible to declare your
environment exactly once, and use that single definition in several different
ways, including:
A local shell created through devbox shell
A devcontainer you can use with VSCode
A Dockerfile so you can build a production image with the exact same tools you
used for development.
A remote development environment in the cloud that mirrors your local
environment.
Quickstart: Fast, Deterministic Shell
In this quickstart we'll create a development shell with specific tools
installed. These tools will only be available when using this Devbox shell,
ensuring we don't pollute your machine.
Open a terminal in a new empty folder.
Initialize Devbox:
devbox init
This creates a devbox.json file in the current directory. You should commit
it to source control.
Add command-line tools from Nix. For example, to add Python 3.10:
Devbox 是一款命令行工具，通过在 devbox.json 文件中声明软件包，创建相互隔离、可复现的开发环境。它底层使用 Nix，而不是 Docker 或虚拟机。