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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 ..

Repository structure

  • The devenv CLI is in src/devenv/cli.py.
  • The flake.nix auto-generation logic lies in src/modules/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, run devnenv test <example-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.