nix-dev-shells

Isolated development environments using Nix Flakes — mainly for cross-compilation (ARM64, ARM32, etc.) and other setups I use often. The idea is tokeep reusable shells in one place, without duplicating shell.nix files across projects.

How to use

To enter an environment:

nix develop ~/nix-dev-shells#arm64

Or with direnv, in your project:

use flake ~/nix-dev-shells#arm64

Structure

.
├── flake.nix          # Entry point
├── flake.lock         # Auto-generated
└── shells/
    ├── nix-arm32-toolchain.nix
    ├── nix-arm64-toolchain.nix
    ├── nix-zephyr-sdk.nix
    └── ...

Each file inside shells/ defines a dev environment. The flake just exposes them under named outputs.

Purpose

Avoid repeating toolchain setups (cross-GCC, headers, libs, etc.) in every project. This isn’t a package or system config — just a personal toolbox of ready-to-go environments.

Requirements

• Nix with flakes enabled (nix --version >= 2.4)
• direnv (optional but handy)

---

No promises of stability. If something breaks, I’ll fix it when I need it.

Optional: Registering the flake globally

If you want to use the environments without typing the full path every time, you can register this flake under a short name:

nix registry add nix-dev-shells ~/nix-dev-shells

Then, you can run:

nix develop nix-dev-shells#arm64

This works globally, from any directory.

Tip: Listing or removing registered flakes

To see your current flake registry:

nix registry list

To remove a registered flake:

nix registry remove nix-dev-shells