I use asdf for everything: elixir, erlang, javascript, yarn, ruby, java, kotlin, rust, terraform

This thread has reminded me how useful #polls are on a forum. Not only can you quickly get a sense of that particular topic by looking at the poll results, but being able to discuss and seek clarification in the thread itself is incredibly useful.

Let’s try something new - whenever we post a poll on an important topic such as this one we’ll also pin it for a week. If that ends up being useful we’ll go through each of our polls on an annual basis and pin them for a week too, perhaps renewing them (with a new thread) every 3 to 5 years (depending whether there are new options available, etc).

Nix allows me to version way more things than just runtimes/compilers. Additionally this completely prevents me from Erlang/Elixir version mismatch. I use Nix also as my system package manager, so it is like Homebrew and ASDF in one package. Also the idea that I do not need to have packages available globally and instead have them per-environment is very useful.

You can version everything, DB, ElixirLS, Vim, OpenSSL, etc.

No, as Nix is whole functional programming language that is used to define working environment, so this is way harder to grasp and understand, but on the other hand it gives you enormous power as it can be used to:

• define work environment
• define CI environment
• configure deployment builds
• provide “simple” definition for others to run your application (for example if this is FLOSS or you need non-Elixir people to run it locally because they are for example mobile developers)

The last one is interesting, because imagine that you have your release defined in default.nix in your repo, so the user on the other end can do (IIRC, I am on my phone so it can differ a little):

let
  my_app = fetchFromGit {
    repo = "https://my-repo.url/repo.git"
  };
in mkDerivation {
  buildInputs = [my_app];
}

And they will have access your application via simple my_app start in their shell (if the derivation is properly written). So this provides way more possibilities than ASDF.

No formal blog posts (yet) as I burnt myself out on blogging last year, but I do have some verbose participation on our local Nix vs ASDF thread here, two Reddit posts here and here, and an org-mode/org-reveal outline for a lightning-ish talk I gave at work a few years ago here, though Elixir is only mentioned briefly in passing.

Today I’m down to 4 packages installed via Homebrew that I haven’t packaged for Nix myself yet, but with 115 (at work) / 145 (at home) Nix packages provided in my home-manager profile. I install PostgreSQL 10.x or 11.x via nix-darwin, and use an overlay to provide the matrix of Erlang/Elixir versions I used to manage with asdf. I dabble infrequently with nixops and currently build my own Docker base images with Nix as well. Honestly, shell.nix and direnv are the real MVPs, though, as the latter has first-class Nix support. The last piece of language-agnostic Nix tooling I really like is lorri.

Hope that gives anyone curious something to chew on!

Nix is life, Nix is love

I have previously used ASDF and I was using it for a lot of stuff - Ruby, Terraform, Consul, Packer, Rust (partially), Node, etc.