Flox has announced that its Command Line Interface (CLI) and FloxHub are now generally available. The CLI is open source and FloxHub is free for anyone to use.

Flox combines a virtual environment and package manager all in one. It began life during the deployment of Nix at the D. E. Shaw group, where it was used to make Nix easier for newcomers and offered centralized control over packages.

With Flox you create environments that layer and replace dependencies, making them portable across the full software lifecycle. Flox also lets you share your environments with others and build container images. The Flox CLI 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. FloxHub is a cloud service that enables you to share your Flox environments. The development team says the Hub is designed to help developers define their environments with precision, use them to collaborate efficiently with others, and align them with the software they ship.

Using a declarative framework based on the Nix package management and configuration tool, Flox allows developers to create environments that contain everything they need to build software. These environments come with a software bill of materials (SBOM) that can be used to audit, address vulnerabilities, and recreate the exact conditions for hard-to-reproduce bugs.

The Flox CLI can be used on desktops and servers. It has been released under the GNU General Public License v2.0 meaning anyone can copy, distribute, and modify a piece of software. Both the CLI and hub allow software developers to create portable environments that provide consistency across  machines and projects. These environments allow developers to encapsulate new dependencies and layer them on top of personalizations and customizations already existing on their machines, such as locally installed editors or existing CLI software or shell scripts. Because Flox encapsulates these dependencies, it avoids issues caused by subtle version differences.

Ron Efroni, co-founder and CEO at Flox, said:

"Creating environments where developers can build reliable, reproducible and auditable software while benefiting from the amazing growth of the software commons is not a small undertaking and we take the responsibility seriously. We believe Flox will help organizations begin a transformation that will save their developers time and build trust in the software they deliver."

More Information

Flox

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