Introducing ic-nix, a ready made, cross-platform, and bleeding edge dev environment!

Developers
#1
  • Want to build latest of replica, motoko, dfx, etc. straight from source? Check!
  • Wonder where to get pre-built binaries? Check!
  • One liner to start canister development without waiting for official release? Check!
  • It is cross-platforms ready! Native on m1 macbooks, anyone? Check!
  • All system canisters and did files in one place? Check!
  • Looking for obscure binaries such as ic-prep or ic-admin? Check!

For example, to start canister development with platform-native dfx binaries in less than 10 seconds! (network conditions apply):

nix-shell https://github.com/ninegua/ic-nix/releases/latest/download/dfx-env.tar.gz

This will download pre-built binaries if your platform is supported by Github CI. But also offers an option if you decide to build from source (which may take quite a while)!

Because Github has yet to support aarch64, so for m1 macbook the only option now is to build from source (add --arg force true to the above command). So not quite ready made, but still it absolutely works! :grin: Edit: I uploaded pre-built binaries for aarch64 in this release. Enjoy!

New releases will automatically be made on a weekly basis. Or you can make PRs to have github build for you!

For non nix users, you can still check out the binaries nevertheless, if you are curious.

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#2

Just curious, do people in the community ever build the replica themselves? I can’t imagine why they would do so (even for node providers). In any case, thanks for sharing!

#3

It is mostly because I had my 5 year old surface book replaced by a m1 macbook :grin:

But also I think it is good to get the knowledge out there “anyone can build all binaries”.

2 Likes