How to globally activate a nix-shell?

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Thanks! sourcing it in .profile file was indeed a great option.

but it’s not very straight foward, thought.

When we run nix-shell we spawn a new shell instead of sourcing the env to the current one.
So my solution was to use direnv ( Nix · direnv/direnv Wiki · GitHub )

so I added this to my .profile

(
 cd /path/to/project;
  direnv export bash > /tmp/startup-shell
)

source /tmp/startup-shell

one caveat is that direnv does not support alias definitions. But those are fine to just add to the .bashrc file.