Developing with Nix

Nix is a package manager for building reproducible packages across machines.
You can see how to install nix at https://nixos.org/download

The tagion repo contains a flake.nix which means that it provides a variety of outputs. Currently outputs are only defined for x86_64-linux

Enabled Nix Flakes

Nix flakes are an experimental feature of Nix and need to be enabled. You can see more about flakes and how they can be enabled here https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Flakes#Enable_flakes_temporarily

How you enable flakes may depend on how you use nix and how you want to use flakes.

The most universal way to enable them is like this.

$ echo "experimental-features = nix-command flakes" >> ~/.config/nix/nix.conf

This will enter a new shell with all the tool needed to develop tagion

$ nix develop

This will compile tagion, and output an executable in result/bin

$ nix build

$ nix flake check

Install direnv. We recommend a variation of it called nix-direnv

Inside the tagion working directory type the command.

$ direnv allow

Now every time you enter the directory the development shell will automatically be activated.