Learn why having an isolated environment is useful, why setting up an environment with Direnv can be tough, and walk through an example of Direnv + De

Automate Project Environments with Devbox and Direnv

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2024-07-10 01:30:03

Learn why having an isolated environment is useful, why setting up an environment with Direnv can be tough, and walk through an example of Direnv + Devbox for a sample NodeJS application.

The challenge of managing multiple projects in the same operating system has been met with many different solutions over the years. We've progressed from virtual machines (VirtualBox) to container systems (Docker), and even isolated shells (nix-shell). We built Devbox to make isolated shell environments easy to learn, use, and configure. The combination of easy shell environments with Devbox, combined with convenient environment switching with Direnv makes it simple to manage multiple projects without having their setups interfere or leak into one another.

In this blog we’re going to explore why having an isolated environment is useful, explain why setting up an environment with Direnv can be tough, and showcase an example with our optimal combination: Direnv + Devbox for a sample NodeJS application.

The listed items above are not the only reasons why you might want to have an isolated environment. Based on the use case, there might be other motivations but regardless, setting up isolated environments can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Let’s explore setting up an environment with Direnv below.