Mitchell: Today we launched Flox 1.0 [LWN.net]

Zach Mitchell has announced the 1.0 release of Flox, a tool that lets its users install packages from nixpkgs inside portable virtual environments, and share those virtual environments with others as an alternative to Docker-style containers. Flox is based on Nix but allows users to skip learning how to work with the Nix language:

With Flox we're providing a substantially better user experience. We provide the suite of package manager functionality with install, uninstall, etc, but we also provide an entire new suite of functionality with the ability to share environments via flox push, flox pull, and flox activate --remote.

Flox is GPLv2-licensed, and releases are available as RPMs and Debian packages for x86_64 and arm64 systems.

Mitchell: Today we launched Flox 1.0

Posted Mar 15, 2024 23:19 UTC (Fri) by gray_-_wolf (subscriber, #131074) [Link] (1 responses)

I looked into the sharing part of the documentation, and it seems that sharing involves something called floxhub? Is is possible to just get .tar out of it like I can from Guix pack? So that I could move it around and unpack even on machines without flox?

Mitchell: Today we launched Flox 1.0

Posted Mar 16, 2024 13:32 UTC (Sat) by Deubeuliou (subscriber, #50509) [Link]

From what I read in the documentation, you may simply share the manifest file. Alternatively, flox may generate a container image which you can then copy around.