Using Nix to Contribute

Sandbox Prerequisites:

• multi-user nix with the flakes and nix-command features enabled. For this we recommend the Determinate Nix Installer which has these features enabled by default.

The following link will install nix with the above features and include the bonsol binary cache as a trusted substitutor. Without the substitutor many dependencies will build from source, which could take a the first time they are built!

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install --extra-conf "extra-substituters = https://bonsol.cachix.org" --extra-conf "extra-trusted-public-keys = bonsol.cachix.org-1:yz7vi1rCPW1BpqoszdJvf08HZxQ/5gPTPxft4NnT74A="

• docker (see why)

Note that upon installation, the current terminal does not have the nix executable on $PATH. Open a new terminal and verify the installation with nix --version. Double check that cat /etc/nix/nix.conf includes this line: experimental-features = nix-command flakes.

Fork and Clone the Repo

git clone https://github.com/<your-fork>/bonsol.git
cd bonsol

Sandbox Development Environment

# By default nix develop will enter a new bash shell with developer tools on $PATH.
# If you have a preferred shell, it can be passed as a command with the `-c` option.
nix develop -c zsh

This development environment overrides pre-existing global tools (excluding docker) with the ones provided by nix for this sub-shell instance. Exiting the nix devShell with exit will place you back in the shell environment prior to entering the nix sub-shell.

With nix we can also run our CI checks locally, try it out with:

nix flake check