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Hi folks, My name is Roman Valihura. I'm the author of this extension. I'm Ukrainian. I was born in Ukraine. I'm living here at the moment.

As you all know Russia invaded my country. Russia has already killed thousands of civilians and continues the war and terror in Ukraine.

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Nix Environment Selector

Extension that lets you use environments declared in .nix files in Visual Studio Code.

Motivation

Nix package manager provides a way of creating isolated environments with a specific configuration of packages. These environments are usually activated in the terminal and are not convenient to use within an IDE.

One option is to run nix-shell on the command line and then launch code within the activated shell. However, this process can quickly become tedious. Nix Environment Selector provides an alternative: can automatically apply the environment.

Getting started

Install Nix package manager.
Restart VS Code (to make sure that nix-shell is in the PATH)
Install the extension.
Create the Nix environment config (like default.nix or shell.nix or flake.nix) in the root of your project's workspace.
Open Command Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P) and run Nix-Env: Select Environment command.
Choose the Nix environment you'd like to apply.
Wait for the environment to build.
Restart VS Code to apply the built environment.

Example

Haskell project

To run a Haskell application you need to have GHC (Haskell compiler) installed. With Nix package manager we can create an isolated environment containing only the GHC version and the dependencies that the project needs without polluting the user's environment.

Environment configuration in shell.nix:

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:
with pkgs;

let
  haskellDeps = ps: with ps; [
    base
    lens
    mtl
    random
  ];
  haskellEnv = haskell.packages.ghc865.ghcWithPackages haskellDeps;
in mkShell {
  buildInputs = [
    haskellEnv
    haskellPackages.cabal-install
    gdb
  ];
}

Now let's try to open our project in Visual Studio Code.

Without Env Demo

As you can see VS Code can't find the GHC compiler. Let's apply the environment declared in shell.nix.

With Env Demo

Bingo 🎉🎉🎉. Everything is working now 😈

Configuration

You can configure the extension in .vscode/settings.json file (located in the root of the workspace). Here are the configuration settings:

Setting	Default	Description
`nixEnvSelector.nixFile`	null	Path to the Nix config file
`nixEnvSelector.packages`	[]	List of packages passed as `-p` args to nix-shell
`nixEnvSelector.args`	null	Additional args for nix-shell. EX: `-A <something> --pure`
`nixEnvSelector.nixShellPath`	null	Custom path to the nix-shell executable
`nixEnvSelector.useFlakes`	false	Enable support for `flake.nix`
`nixEnvSelector.suggestion`	true	Show a proposal to select an environment when a `.nix` file is detected
`nixEnvSelector.logLevel`	`info`	Output channel verbosity: `debug` \| `info` \| `warn` \| `error`

Supported Platforms

MacOS
Linux
Windows (with Remote - WSL extension)

Support

If you like the extension and want to support author, click the button bellow.

License

MIT