Nix flakes are great for giving reproducible dev environments, but we also wanted to run a few environmental “checks” along that for newcomers to a flake-managed project. Such as whether max-jobs is set to an appropriate value, or whether you are accidentally using Rosetta emulation of Nix or whether direnv is being used.
So, here’s a program that does that: nix-health
The checks can be customized in the project’s flake.nix. For eg., projects that use direnv can indicate that developers must have direnv installed and activated.
nix-health.default = {
nix-version.min-required = "2.16.0";
caches.required = [ "https://cache.garnix.io" ];
direnv.required = true;
system = {
# required = true;
min_ram = "16G";
# min_disk_space = "2T";
};
};
Support for custom checks is planned for the future.
nix-health is available in nixpkgs; you can run it using nix run nixpkgs#nix-health.