After spending some time researching possible solutions for non containerised development environments on NixOS, I have finally settled on Devbox from Jetpack. This enables me to configure required services per project, quickly and easily, on any machine.

Devbox creates isolated, reproducible development environments that run anywhere. No Docker containers or Nix lang required

Installing Devbox⌗

Use the following install script to get the latest version of Devbox:

curl -fsSL https://get.jetpack.io/devbox | bash

Read the quickstart docs for an overview of what’s available. Read on here for configuring a sample Symfony web project.

Create a new Symfony project⌗

  • Start a new nix shell with the minimum package requirements
nix-shell -p php82 php82Packages.composer symfony-cli

Then from inside the nix-shell create a new Symfony project using the symfony-cli tool:

symfony new symfony-project
  • Exit the nix-shell and switch into the newly created project directory
  • Init the devbox
devbox init
  • Add the required devbox services
devbox add caddy curl php82 php82Packages.composer
  • At this point we can open a devbox shell and confirm we have the expected php and composer versions
php -v

PHP 8.2.7 (cli) (built: Jun  6 2023 21:28:56) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.7, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.2.7, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

composer --version

Composer version 2.6.5 2023-10-06 10:11:52

  • Before starting the devbox services, a couple of things need to be changed. Change the port caddy is listening on from 8082 to 8083 to avoid clashing with the php82fpm default port number, change the root to the public/ directory of the project and add directive to serve php files.

    The caddy config file should now have the following content:

# devbox.d/caddy/Caddyfile

# See https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile for more details
{
	admin 0.0.0.0:2020
	auto_https disable_certs
	http_port 8800
	https_port 4443
}

:8083 {
	root * {$DEVBOX_PROJECT_ROOT}/public
    php_fastcgi 127.0.0.1:{$PHPFPM_PORT}

	log {
		output file {$CADDY_LOG_DIR}/caddy.log
	}
	file_server
}

You can now start the devbox services:

devbox services up

The project is now ready and available to browse on http://localhost:8083/

Further services, e.g. a database, can be added as required. See the excellent documentation for more info.