Learning Journey tutorial - sharing dependencies between default.nix and shell.nix

[zmitchell]

Project description

A user can drop into a development shell with only a default.nix. However, if they want other tools as part of their development workflow that they don't want included in their build, they need to create a shell.nix with a packages attribute. In order to still perform the build in the shell the dependencies and inputs from the derivation also need to be present. The naive way of making this work is by simply duplicating the buildInputs etc from the default.nix. A more ergonomic way of making this work is by allowing the shell.nix to use the inputs already defined in the default.nix. In this tutorial we'd like to show the user how to accomplish this.

Steps

• Submit a PR with an outline of the tutorial
• Submit a PR with a draft of the tutorial

Considerations

We'd like this tutorial to be focused around a developer workflow where the shell.nix is providing a development environment.

This means we'd like the tutorial to have a concrete project that the reader is working on, like building a program.

This means that the program needs to be incredibly easy to build/package with Nix so that this part of the tutorial doesn't distract the user from what you're trying to teach them: how to share dependencies between default.nix and shell.nix.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-06-19-tutorial-series-call-for-feedback-1/29377/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-06-22-learning-journey-working-group-meeting-notes-14/29490/1