Twilio Development Nix Expressions

This is a fully pinned, reproducible development environment and package set for Twilio projects, based on the Nix purely functional package manager. It uses lorri to automatically build a full set of Twilio's standard development tools on-demand in the background, and places them fully configured on your $PATH while you are in a project directory. It also has a mechanism to automatically expose npm installed packages on $PATH.

Quick Install

• Clone this repo to wherever you want your Twilio projects to live.
• (macOS) Install the Nix package manager, if needed, with:

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume --daemon

• (macOS, optional but recommended) Install nix-darwin

• (Linux) Install the Nix package manager, if needed, with:

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

• (NixOS or nix-darwin) Import the twilio-nix module into your configuration.nix or darwin-configuration.nix with:

  {
  imports = [
    # [... your other imports here]
  
    /path/to/twilio-nix/module.nix
  ];
  }

• (plain Linux or macOS) Install lorri and direnv.

• Setup direnv's shell hook and/or install a direnv plugin for your editor of choice.

• (Optional) Create a ~/.config/git/ignore file with these contents:

.envrc
shell.nix
.log/

This will automatically ignore the files twilio-nix requires in project root directories.

Usage

• Dependencies are built automatically by Nix and lorri, either by your shell or by your editor with the appropriate plugin, as soon as a twilio-nix subdirectory is entered.
• Clone or create your projects in the projects subdirectory of twilio-nix.
• Create a shell.nix file in the project directory with these contents:

import ../../shell.nix { }

If you need extra packages in that project (such as linters and formatters used by your editor, development tools, or any other command line utility), use nix search to find their package name, then pass them as extraPkgs to shell.nix:

import ../../shell.nix { extraPkgs = [
                           # [ list of packages ]
                         ]; }

• Copy .envrc from the twilio-nix root directory, then run direnv allow.
• Wait for Nix to finish building all of your project's dependencies in the background. direnv in your shell may alert you when a build is done (press enter to call up a new prompt to refresh), or you can check lorri's logs for a status update (available at /var/tmp/lorri.log if you are using twilio-nix's module.nix).
• If you type npm install in this environment, all of the binaries installed as part of your current project will be on your $PATH as long as you're inside the project directory.
• Ad-hoc Node dependencies that don't need project scope can be installed into the twilio-nix root project.json.
• Development environments are fully isolated from each other by path (with the presence of a .envrc and shell.nix determining where a new environment starts), so multiple projects can have completely independent sets of dependencies, even if those dependencies would otherwise conflict.
• Nix will automatically rebuild changed parts of the development environment; that is, anything listed in shell.nix.

Bugs

• On macOS, lorri may occasionally ignore changed files. pkill lorri in a terminal will cause it to restart (if started as a launchd service) and respond to changed files again.