Development Environment

This project provides two options for setting up a development environment with all the linting and development tools used in CI.

Nix flakes provide a reproducible development environment that works on any Linux distribution.

Prerequisites

  • Nix with flakes enabled
  • Optionally direnv for automatic shell activation

Enabling Flakes

If you haven’t enabled flakes, add this to ~/.config/nix/nix.conf:

experimental-features = nix-command flakes

Entering the Development Shell 

foo@bar:~$ direnv allow

One-time use (alternative) 

foo@bar:~$ nix develop

Available Tools

The development shell includes all tools used in CI:

Tool Purpose
shellcheck Bash script linting
shfmt Bash script formatting
nil Nix language diagnostics
nixfmt Nix code formatting
hadolint Dockerfile linting
markdownlint-cli2 Markdown linting
cspell Spell checking
actionlint GitHub Actions workflow linting
yamllint YAML linting
podman Container runtime
gh GitHub CLI

Option 2: VS Code Devcontainer

If you use VS Code and prefer containers over Nix, a devcontainer configuration is included.

Requirements

Getting Started

  1. Open the project in VS Code
  2. When prompted, click “Reopen in Container”
  3. Or use the command palette: Dev Containers: Reopen in Container

The devcontainer includes:

  • Docker-in-docker for building images
  • Nix with nil language server
  • shellcheck and hadolint
  • VS Code extensions for real-time linting feedback

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