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Contributing

Join our community on Discord to discuss the development of devenv.

When contributing, please note that smaller pull requests have a higher chance of being accepted, and pull requests with tests will be prioritized.

We have a rule that new features need to come with documentation and tests (devenv-run-tests) to ensure the project stays healthy.

Preparing the devenv development environment

  1. Follow the installation instructions for Nix and Cachix.

  2. git clone https://github.com/cachix/devenv.git

  3. cd devenv

  4. To build the project, run nix-build.

  5. ./result/bin/devenv shell

  6. Once you have made changes, run ./result/bin/devenv shell again.

To automate this workflow, install and use direnv.

Repository structure

  • The devenv CLI is in src/devenv.nix.
  • The flake.nix auto-generation logic lies in src/flake.nix.
  • All modules related to devenv.nix are in src/modules/.
  • Examples are automatically tested on CI and are the best way to work on developing new modules, see examples/.
  • Documentation is in docs/.
  • To run a development server, run devenv up.

Contributing language improvements

Language integration happens in stages. We welcome even the most basic support for getting started.

The most basic language support starts with the languages.*.enable flag, which turns on basic tooling. For an example, see src/modules/languages/elm.nix.

The next step is to make the tooling customizable, so the versions can be overridden. Most languages will come with either a languages.*.package or languages.*.packages option that allows the user to customize what version or package of the language they want to pick.

A further step is to provide languages.*.version option, which allows the user to specify the exact version of the language. For an example, see src/modules/languages/rust.nix.