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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 and install direnv.

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

  3. cd devenv

  4. To build the project, run direnv allow . or build devenv manually using nix build .#devenv which allows to run development version of devenv outside of source code directory by calling <PATH-TO-DEVENV-SOURCE-CODE>/result/bin/devenv.

Creating development project

  1. mkdir devenv-project && cd devenv-project

  2. <PATH-TO-DEVENV-SOURCE-CODE>/result/bin/devenv init

  3. Add devenv input pointing to local source directory to devenv.yaml 

    devenv:
  url: path:<PATH-TO-DEVENV-SOURCE-CODE>?dir=src/modules

  4. <PATH-TO-DEVENV-SOURCE-CODE>/result/bin/devenv update

Repository structure

  • The devenv CLI is in devenv/src/main.rs.
  • The flake.nix auto-generation logic lies in devenv/src/flake.tmpl.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/ and tests/
  • Documentation is in docs/.
  • To run a development server, run devenv up.
  • To run a test from examples/ or tests/, run devenv-run-tests --only <name>.

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.