Ensure fonts in development environment

knedlsepp · July 30, 2022, 9:53pm

As this wasn’t mentioned yet:
In a development shell you will probably want to set:

export FONTCONFIG_FILE=...

In nixpkgs there’s a makeFontsConf that you can use with that.

See e.g.

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/716bc55f98263683ec78508aca162922df4bc30a/pkgs/development/python-modules/graphviz/default.nix#L44


      
              inherit graphviz;
              xdgutils = xdg-utils;
            })
          ];
          
          
postPatch = ''
            sed -i "/--cov/d" setup.cfg
          '';
          
          
# Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
          FONTCONFIG_FILE = makeFontsConf {
            fontDirectories = [ freefont_ttf ];
          };
          
          
checkInputs = [
            mock
            pytest
            pytest-mock
          ];
          
          
checkPhase = ''

Note that this can lead to undesired situations where globally installed fonts won’t be able to be found anymore inside this development shell unless you explicitly list global directories in your call to makeFontsConf.