Have you ever found yourself wanting to work on a rust project on NixOS without having to write a flake.nix or a shell.nix for that project? You need rust-nix-shell, a program halfway between rustup and nix-shell! No more are the glibc errors that plague rustup on NixOS; gone are the horrible nix-shell -E '...' incantations to set RUST_SRC_PATH properly in an ephemeral shell.

rust-nix-shell allows you to create a shell environment with any version of rust, à la rustup. You can also specify other dependencies with -p, à la nix-shell.

This program is intended for use on NixOS. If your system is not NixOS then I'd recommend using rustup instead of this --- unless you know that you want a nix-based rust environment, you probably don't.

This program shells out to nix-shell, finding it from $PATH. It also by default calls zsh from $PATH, but this is configurable

Optionally, if a copy of fenix is found at <fenix> (in $NIX_PATH), it will be used instead of downloading fenix master using fetchtarball every time.

This repository is a flake, providing the output rust-nix-shell.

The recommended way of installing this is by adding it to your system configuration. (For an example, look at my system flake)

Failing that, it can be run ephemerally with nix run:

nix run 'github:Sciencentistguy/rust-nix-shell' -- [rust-nix-shell arguments]

Or, it can be installed using nix profile:

nix profile install 'github:Sciencentistguy/rust-nix-shell'

For backwards compatibility, a default.nix is provided, allowing rust-nix-shell to be installed using nix-env:

nix-env -f 'https://github.com/Sciencentistguy/rust-nix-shell/archive/master.tar.gz' -i rust-nix-shell

rust-nix-shell --help

You can specify the channel as an optional argument. This must be one of:

• stable
• beta
• nightly
• A specific nightly: nightly-YYYY-mm-dd
• A rust tagged release, e.g. 1.60 or 1.58.1

Available under the terms of version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public Licence