TIL: Devbox + Nix

Today I learned about Devbox — it uses Nix under the hood to give you per-project, isolated development shells without having to learn Nix itself.

curl -fsSL https://get.jetify.com/devbox | bash
cd your-project
devbox init
devbox add nodejs@20 python@3.12 just
devbox shell

You declare tools in a devbox.json, run devbox shell, and you're dropped into an environment with exactly those versions — no containers, no VMs, no system-wide installs. Exit the shell and your system is unchanged.

I've always wanted an excuse to use Nix for local development and this is it. 400,000+ packages, pinned versions via a lockfile, and zero Nix code required.