Idea: bootsrap via direnv source_url

[Mic92]

direnv has this cool feature to download scripts to extend direnv functionality. I use this method here in nix-direnv: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv#direnv-source_url

Would you be interested in having similar functionality for nix-portable? The script could check if nix is available and if not download nix-portable (with the appropriate arch check).

[DavHau]

Not sure if I understand correctly. The use case for this would be, if one has direnv installed, but not nix, and some .envrc requires nix, it would automatically fetch nix-portable?

What would need to change in nix-portable to make this happen? I guess it would need a default.nix that returns a single derivation? Since the current default.nix strongly depends on stuff defined in flakes.nix, it is probably best to add a flakes-compat.nix

[DavHau]

Guess I was thinking too complicated. The script could just download the pre-built binary from github. No need to build anything on the client. That wouldn't work anyways, since it doesn't have nix to begin with.

[Mic92]

Right. It should also check if nix is already installed and only install it otherwise.

[DavHau]

Sounds like a good idea. I'd be happy about a PR.

[yajo]

But... does direnv and nix-portable actually work well together? Because nix-portable does not write stuff in /nix, and AFAIK direnv expects that path when enabling nix, isn't it? Is there a workaround I don't know? See https://github.com/direnv/direnv/issues/875