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nix

Install​

UPDATE 2020-11-11: Nix has improved installations for Catalina since we started using it. Check the official installation guide if you're running macOS Catalina or older.

Nix is a really nice cross-platform package manager. Think brew but supporting multiple versions at the same time, and ability to create hermetic and isolated environments for any software. It will not mess around with your existing packages. It supports Linux and macOS.

So Nix is the only piece of software needed. It will install the rest of the tools, and will make sure we all use the same versions. You don't need node, go or anything else.

Install Nix following the official instructions.

IMPORTANT​

  • If you are on macOS Catalina or above you'll have to create a separate APFS volume that should be mounted at /nix. The installer should guide you through the process. Don't be scared.
  • Check if $HOME/.nix-profile exists. if not, you need to execute nix-env -i nix. This will install nix using Nix, and you need to do it because of some issues when installing new versions of the system. after this command finish executing, you should have this path available.
  • Check your shell profile. The installer should've added a new line that would source Nix profile into your shell. If it doesn't happen, just add it yourself:
. $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh

OPTIONAL​

  • Run sudo mdutil -i off /nix to disable Spotlight indexing. Recommended!
  • Run sudo SetFile -a V /nix && sudo killall Finder to hide Nix disk volume from the Desktop.

Hermetic Toolchains​

There's a one-time setup required for all this to work.

Install direnv by running

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.direnv

Add direnv hook to your shell profile:

eval "$(direnv hook bash)"  # for bash
eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"   # for zsh
eval (direnv hook fish)     # for fish

Then cd to the repository and run:

direnv allow .

This will ask direnv to setup the environment when you navigate to the directory with the project.

So open up the directory with the project in a new terminal, and run which go to test if it will find Go toolchain.