Hey HN,
I'm Ron Efroni, CEO at Flox, and today we are releasing version 1.0 of our open source CLI, helping folks manage development environments everywhere.My own experience with development environments began with air-gapped systems, having to actually burn software to a CD to iterate over a very slow and expensive development cycle, sometimes reaching the server rack and realizing I have the wrong disk.... Fast forward to today and there are countless alternatives available backed by incredible compute resources, yet we somehow still find ourselves paying the price of long development cycles. That's why I've been working for over a decade to simplify the development stack so we can spend more time on making 1's and 0's do magical things, and why my co-founder Michael and I started Flox to bring you the solution based on Nix. Today is just the first step on that journey. We hope you'll take a peek at our new release, and very much look forward to continuing the journey with you from here together!
Introducing Flox 1.0
Flox is a platform that lets developers and operators focus on building fast with reproducible environments that span the enterprise SDLC. Using a declarative framework based on Nix, a package management and configuration tool, Flox allows developers to create environments that contain everything they need to build software.
Why Flox?
Flox behaves a lot like your favorite and familiar package manager, but it allows you to create as many environments as you want on your machine. Each one can contain a different combination of packages.
Environments are portable by default. If you install a package inside one that isn't cross-platform, it's easy to carve out exceptions. It's also easy to write hooks and populate your environment with variables - we designed it to be hackable.
Flox environments run in user-space, like, where you are. When you type `ls` after activating a Flox environment you will see the same stuff because you're in the same place - even with all those new packages available. No mounting volumes, no proxying ports. No breaking into the toolset you just conjured.
Getting Started: No sign-ups, just one install away. Dive into our GitHub repository (https://github.com/flox/flox) and start exploring
I’m around all day to answer questions, talk Nix, or just reminisce about simpler times ;).
Lots of open source love, Ron