Show HN: Nixhub.io – Find Specific Versions of Nix Packages (nixhub.io)

Two benefits to Nix that I can think of:

1. It has a wider range of packages available vs asdf. Asdf can support runtimes that have an asdf plugin, whereas Nix has over 80,000 packages available in it's registry

2. Nix also handles the dependencies for the packages you want to install. If you runtime requires a compiler, specific libraries, etc, Nix will ensure those are installed.

Of course, Nix can be challenging to get started with. If you want to try Nix but find the language intimidating, you can try something like Devbox first.

Nix is a much more general purpose tool than asdf.

Nix can also be used to build Docker images, VM images, or configure a NixOS system. Nix's packages can also be run without being installed.

Specifically for setting up a development environment? As sibling pointed out, nix shells can provide native libraries.

With nix shell, it's also possible to have the shell be strictly 'pure', in that the shell's environment will only be what's declared in the Nix shell. Having that ensures that you're not relying on environment variables you set elsewhere, or stuff you installed elsewhere.

For flake.nix, you add that to the inputs, for example, call it `nixpkgs-old`, and then reference the package of interest with:

`nixpkgs-old.legacyPacakges.linux-x86_64.node`, or something like below

  let pkgs = import nixpkgs-old {
    system = "linux-x86_64";
  } in pkgs.mkShell {
    packages = [ pkgs.node ];
  }

  let 
     pkgs = import nixpkgs-old { system = "linux-x86_64"; } 
  in 
     pkgs.mkShell { packages = [ pkgs.node ]; }

A few ways to use it are:

1. Install in your global profile with the CLI:

  nix profile install nixpkgs/3276b62e6639096014652132f4824ac2b4f2a2c4#nodejs

2. In a flake.nix, you can set an input with the nixpkgs commit hash, like:

  inputs = {
    node-nixpkgs.url = "nixpkgs/3276b62e6639096014652132f4824ac2b4f2a2c4";
  };

...and then use nodejs from that `node-nixpkgs` input to get the exact version you wanted

If you are unfamiliar with Nix, just install with devbox. That said, you can also do `nix profile install` but then you kinda lose that nice declarative layer that devbox has. Now for some reason if you really want to do advanced customization of nodejs, then make a flake. Overkill for nodejs tho. Rust maybe.

From a short look I see it uses devbox in the install instructions as opposed to nix-shell

Probably a polished design to promote devbox

https://search.nixos.org/packages only shows packages that are available on the latest stable and unstable releases of Nixpkgs. The means they only have a limited number of versions for a given package available. For example, Python on unstable only has 5 versions to choose from:

  - 2.7.18
  - 3.9.17
  - 3.8.17 
  - 3.11.4
  - 3.12.0b3

If you need something different, you need to find a specific commit of the NixOS/nixpkgs repo that has that version. This information is not indexed or searchable on the official package search. Nixhub.io provides an index of these older released commits, so you can find and install versions that aren't available in the latest Nix releases.

If you visit https://www.nixhub.io/packages/python, you can see we have a lot more versions available. Developers can use the Nix or Devbox references on that page to install the version they need.

Fuzzy search is definitely on our todo list!

We haven't open sourced it, but we are planning to write a deep dive on how we built the index and how the search service works.