First call to devbox shell can take a while

[loreto]

And there's no progress bar or other indication of progress which makes users think it's stuck.

[datashaman]

I've tried installing various tools. As you say, it just hangs there. Is it doing anything? There are no options for debugging or logging on the CLI. It appears not to work at all.

On Mac:

~ nix-env --version
nix-env (Nix) 2.10.3
~ Docker --version
Docker version 20.10.17, build 100c701

[loreto]

It is installing, and it will complete... the first time nix run takes a while because it installs a bunch of dependencies for the first time.

We'll address by giving an idea of progress in the terminal.

[adrianhopebailie]

What about a command to explicitly install dependancies without spawning the shell?

devbox install

[carlthome]

This was pretty confusing UX to me too in my test spin unfortunately. At least with nix build and nix shell I'm getting a lot of helpful progress bars for binary cache downloads and compiling. Staring at a devbox shell having no insight into how long it will take or if it's even doing anything is a pretty bad onboarding experience TBH.

[acheong08]

How long should devbox shell be running for? I have extremely slow internet and it's been running for two hours already...

[loreto]

How long should devbox shell be running for? I have extremely slow internet and it's been running for two hours already...

Wow, that's definitely too long. This is the top issue we're working on – I'll circle back with an update later today.

[loreto]

OK, folks, we just released a new version of devbox that should address some of these concerns. If you installed via our install script, you should get the new version automatically next time you run the binary.

We did two changes:

1. We now fetch nix packages via a tarball, which is faster than the previous git-based approach.
2. We now print to the console explaining we are setting up nix. For now it's just a single line that we print, but over-time we'll make it a more sophisticated progress bar.

[loreto]

OK, I'm closing this issue because I think we addressed the most important bottlenecks. But feel free to open a new issue if you're seeing other problems related to speed.

@adrianhopebailie I opened this issue: #22 to track your idea of having a devbox install