The flox CLI, released in open beta today, is a multi-platform environment manager built on Nix. It is intended to provide a dependable interface to nixpkgs, a collection of over 80,000 open source packages. 

While Nix provides access to this resource it has a steep learning curve. To address this recent startup floxdev has introduced flox to make Nix tools more accessible by offering the first end-to-end solution that enables teams to accelerate and simplify their Systems Development Life Cycle. 

According to its co-founder and CEO Ron Efroni, who is a member of the NixOS Foundation board, 

“We created flox to give developers better collaboration and control over their development lifecycle, including improved automation over production releases, reduced operational risk and increased productivity. We recognized the vast power of Nix but knew there was a market need to take developer tools to the next level, providing versioned environments-as-code that could be consistently released, updated and maintained, and that could offer improved security and efficiency."

flox expands on Nix’s unique approach to package management and system configuration to provide convenience, collaboration and control throughout the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). 

• Convenience

  • Easy access to the most complete and up-to-date collection of open source packages via Nixpkgs

  • Manage environments using declarative code and share environments across machines, architectures and operating systems

  • Integration of flox environments into CI/CD pipelines

• Collaboration 

• • Share your environments and software packages across individuals, teams or organizations 

• • Publish packages into organizational catalogs for consumption by others within and outside of the organization
• Control
  • Package software into a declarative environment that will work consistently and can be deployed in a repeatable way
  • Benefit from visibility into what software packages are being used
  • Control and govern the compliance of your software inventory and environments. Audit, manage and govern software inventory (SBOM) in all phases of building, publishing and consuming software

  • Benefit from software package integrity, provenance and correctness due to reproducible builds and cache package signing

Flox developer tier is open source and the its version of flox is expected later this year. Sign up here for its Early Access program. 

More Information

flox

Related Articles

GitHub Grows As Business and Open Source Establish Firm Ties

The Trap Snaps Shut - GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Strengthens Team Working

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info