Generate a bin folder inside .devenv

[shyim]

All Jetbrains IDEs needs an absolute path where the executables are living.

It would be nice if we would symlink php to .devenv/bin/php. So you can configure your IDE file path to that directory.
Of course when the package gets updated we update it there too.

A little bit like the /run/current-system/sw

[domenkozar]

I think we can now just symlink profile to .devenv/profile, I'd be open for such a PR.

[shyim]

Should I make this as integration module? Because it's like a "shim" for editors which don't have proper direnv integration

[domenkozar]

We can do it by default in top-level.nix since it's just a symlink

[szlend]

I don't think symlinking the profile is going to be enough in most cases. It might work for PHP, but it's not going to work for gcc/clang or any language that needs to compile and link using those toolchains. They depend on proper environment setup (e.g. PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc). One alternative would be to wrap each binary so it first loads the shell environment (source <(nix print-dev-env)). You could then optimize it by caching nix print-dev-env and only loading it once per process tree.

[szlend]

I quickly hacked together a PoC of this yesterday (plain nix flakes, not devenv)

pkgs.writeShellScriptBin "wrap" ''
  rm -rf .wrap
  mkdir -p .wrap/bin

  nix print-dev-env > .wrap/devshell.sh
  path=$(env -i ${pkgs.bash}/bin/bash -c "source .wrap/devshell.sh && echo \$PATH")

  for path in $(${pkgs.findutils}/bin/find ''${path//:/ } -maxdepth 1 -executable 2> /dev/null); do
    if [[ "$path" == *coreutils* ]]; then continue; fi

    binary=$(basename "$path")
    echo '#!${pkgs.bash}/bin/bash' > ".wrap/bin/$binary"
    echo 'source "$(dirname -- "''${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")/../devshell.sh"' >> ".wrap/bin/$binary"
    echo "exec $path" '"$@"' >> ".wrap/bin/$binary"
    chmod +x ".wrap/bin/$binary"
  done
''

This generates wrapper binaries like this:

#!/nix/store/x380x9d7gqh4ig9h50a7wx08p0s6622f-bash-5.1-p16/bin/bash
source "$(dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")/../devshell.sh"
exec /nix/store/rnjmcss5x5mki8qj2wg76fi082jcvb5z-rust-toolchain/bin/cargo "$@"

I tested it with vscode and rust and was a bit disappointed to find out that the rust-analyzer vscode extension has a lot of the toolchain discovery logic in the extension itself, where the shell environment variables are not available. For example it isn't aware of RUST_SRC_PATH and will be unable to find the rust src dir. Something that is not a problem with direnv. So this solution isn't exactly foolproof either. The Rust toolchain is able to compile C dependencies this way though, so it's better than just symlinking the profile.

FWIW, a lot of these issues are avoidable by joining all packages into a single prefix tree (/{bin,lib,include}). The RUST_SRC_PATH env var for example is unnecessary if rust-src is in the same prefix as rustc.

[shyim]

@szlend I guess this would definitively make sense to have in some kind of "integration module" as it's much more complex than "just" having a symlink.

Or what do you think @domenkozar :)