I recently attended a Thoughtworks webinar about their Technology Radar (cool idea, BTW) and I heard there about Devbox. After reading a bit about it on the Jetify website, I decided to test it a bit.

First steps

The installation is as easy as using curl:

curl -fsSL https://get.jetify.com/devbox | bash

Now let's create a folder to test Devbox:

mkdir devbox
cd devbox/

We need to initialize the devbox environment:

devbox init

This will create a devbox.json template in your folder.

Now let's add some packages. First we'll start with python. To include tkinter, which I sometimes need, I will add the package named python-full but bare python is also possible. If you don't specify a version, it will install the latest released version.

devbox add python-full

Now if you open devbox.json you'll see that a package has been added to the packages section. You can add more packages to include the tools you need for a clean functional development environment

devbox add micro nnn git gh gh-dash lazygit difftastic

OK, we're are now ready to start the dev environment.

devbox shell

The first time you run devbox shell will take a while to complete due to Devbox downloading prerequisites and package catalogs required by Nix. This delay is a one-time cost, and future invocations and package additions should resolve much faster.

You can test which version is installed. On my system I have the default ubuntu Python version 3.10.12, but after launching the devbox shell:

python --version
Python 3.13.2

To exit the devbox shell, just type exit.

Additional features

Devbox also provides the option to perform actions when starting a new shell, via the init_hook property in the devbox.json. This is very powerful, as it can be used to further configure the development environment. For example, in a Node.js project, Devbox can automatically install npm packages.

For Python projects this is particularly helpful, as you can set up the virtual environment automatically at shell startup.

Thoughts

I really like the idea:

  • It reminds me of the Docker promise, without the complexity (for example with network settings) and the heaviness.

  • It also abstracts the apparent complexity of Nix packages.

  • I see it and use it as of sort of makefiles on steroids but easy to understand.

  • Your regular tools are also available including environment variables and config settings. Example:

    git config --get user.name

  • It seems ideal for onboarding new developers during the initial dev machine setup.

  • But Devbox is not really cross-platform: on Windows it will only work if you use the WSL.

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