An introduction to nix-shell
👋 A word of warning, there is a fair amount of hand-waving ahead. Suggestions and corrections are welcome and encouraged! Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or via email!
The command nix-shell will build the dependencies of the specified derivation, but not the derivation itself. It will then start an interactive shell in which all environment variables defined by the derivation path have been set to their corresponding values, and the script $stdenv/setup has been sourced. This is useful for reproducing the environment of a derivation for development.
Running nix-shell will start an interactive bash shell, in the current working directory. The packages required (we’ll see shorty how to specify them) will be downloaded but not installed globally. Instead the shell will have its ENV set appropriately so that all the packages in the shell definition are available.
The nix-shell command receives an optional argument for a .nix file. By default if invoked with no arguments nix-shell will first look for a file named shell.nix and then for one named default.nix.
