cachix/devenv

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7408 stars · 549 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

devenv is a Rust CLI tool that lets developers declare their entire development environment—packages, language toolchains, services, tasks, and processes—in a devenv.nix file built on Nix. It delivers fast incremental evaluation, background shell rebuilding, a terminal UI, a process manager with dependency ordering, and the same environment for local work and CI.

Use cases

• set up a reproducible development environment that works identically on mac and linux
• run postgres, redis, and other services locally without docker compose files
• pin exact compiler and toolchain versions per project without polluting the global system
• give every teammate and CI the same environment from one committed config file
• onboard new developers with a single command that builds the whole stack
• run multiple dev processes with dependency ordering and readiness probes
• declare and load secrets from different providers without committing them

When to choose

• your team needs identical, reproducible environments across laptops and CI and is willing to adopt Nix under the hood
• you want declaratively managed services like PostgreSQL or Redis with a built-in process manager instead of hand-written scripts or containers
• you juggle many projects with conflicting language versions and want per-project, cached toolchains
• you want a friendlier interface to Nix with LSP support, instant caching, and shell reloading

When to avoid

• your team is not prepared to install Nix or learn its ecosystem, since devenv depends on it entirely
• your environment is already fully served by Docker Compose or dev containers and the team prefers that workflow
• you need native Windows support outside WSL2
• you want zero config: devenv is declarative config-first, so fully ad hoc one-off setups are better served by plain shell scripts

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

configuration-management developer-tools cli package-manager developer-tools windows cli nix declarative-environments reproducible-builds devshell process-manager task-runner terminal-ui secrets nixpkgs command-line devops linux macos docker

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