Development Environment

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

Option 1: Nix Flakes (Recommended)

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

With direnv (recommended)

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

Open the project in VS Code
When prompted, click “Reopen in Container”
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

When rebuilding the container, the old nix store volume needs to be removed first. Use docker volume ls to get the exact name and docker volume rm to remove it.