Flox

Build & share dev environments from 100k+ software packages

320 followers

Build & share dev environments from 100k+ software packages

320 followers

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Team collaboration software

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Engineering & Development

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Automation tools

Flox empowers you to build quickly, easily creating reproducible, cross-platform development or application environments—without containers. Based on a simple declarative framework, Flox enables transparent access to all the resources on your system.

Free

Launch tags:Software Engineering•Developer Tools•GitHub

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Hunter

📌

Congrats team Flox, pumped for the launch!

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@benln Thanks Ben! We're super excited and here all day! :D

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

Hey Product Hunt! I'm Ron Efroni, CEO at Flox, and today we're thrilled to announce the release of Flox 1.1, featuring the largest catalog of software available anywhere. 🎉 Our journey at Flox begins and ends with the goal of radically simplifying software development. My own career started with air-gapped systems, where I had to burn software to CDs to iterate over a slow and expensive development cycle. With today’s complex SDLCs, local development is just as frustrating, and sporadic development cycles are the norm rather than the exception. That's why my co-founder Michael and I created Flox, a solution that reimagines the development stack, eliminating snags and friction points so developers can focus on what they do best. Introducing Flox 1.1 Flox is a platform that empowers developers and operators to build quickly using declarative, reproducible environments that span the enterprise SDLC. Flox environments contain everything you need to build software, and are completely reproducible across target systems, from ARM- and x86-based Macs, to ARM- and x86-based Linux machines. They feature optimized binaries, libraries, and code, so they always run performantly on target platforms. All without the hassle of containers! Why Flox? - Next-Level Package Manager: Flox is a package manager with superpowers. It gives you the ability to create multiple, isolated environments, each with a distinct combination of packages. - Portable Reproducibility: Environments are like Python virtual environments, except they’re portable by default, work with any language or toolchain, and optimized for target platforms. - Stackable and Extensible: You can layer individual Flox environments to create reproducible application or development stacks—without building complicated multi-container runtimes. - Seamless Isolation: Flox environments run in user-space, so you can easily access all the files and directories on your system. No need for mounting volumes or proxying ports. - Built on Proven Open-Source Technology. With Flox you get all the benefits of open-source Nix, including reproducible environments and builds, but without the steep learning curve. Getting Started No sign-ups required, just one install away. Dive into our https://github.com/flox/flox and start exploring. I'm here all day to answer questions, discuss Nix, or reminisce about simpler times. 😊 Lots of open-source love, Ron

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2yr ago

@ronef here for reminiscing on simpler times 👋🏻 but: how should I think about using Flox and Docker together? (stacking Flox envs got me thinking!)

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2yr ago

@ronef fantastic. Major congrats

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@alex_mackenzie1 We love Docker! In brief - Docker is great for providing isolation at all levels, and filesystem namespaces in particular provide an effective way to manage independent software stacks at runtime. But while isolation is really useful it sometimes gets in the way - usually when developing software - so it's great to be able to run Flox-managed software side-by-side without interfering with anything else on your system. Flox provides effective software isolation outside of a container, and once development is complete can render a container image from the environment with a simple `flox containerize`. Develop without barriers and deploy with confidence with the knowledge that you are running the exact bits that you test/develop. Hope this helps - here are a few other articles on the topic: * https://flox.dev/blog/flox-and-c... * https://flox.dev/blog/podman-remote

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@ronef @ofer_baharav Thanks!

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2yr ago

Snyk

Wow! This is cool - production grade Nix is awesome. How does this work with already containerized workloads?

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@shar1z Hey! I shared a bit more context here as well - https://www.producthunt.com/post... In general, we aim to work seamlessly with those who already have containerized workloads and it's also a core part of our current roadmap.

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2yr ago

Product Hunt

Super interesting launch @ronef! Would you be able to paint the picture of where this lands in the ecosystem of package managers and containers? More specifically, Flox compare to yarn, pip, and dockerized local development?

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@mikekerzhner Think of Flox as providing the tools and language ecosystems that you previously installed to your base O/S, but in a way that enables completely isolated software stacks to be easily conjured up for different projects, similar to python venv's but a) for all languages and b) providing all recursive library dependencies all the way down to and including glibc. As compared to dockerized development you could say that it provides the same sort of effective software isolation but without barriers - see https://www.producthunt.com/post...

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2yr ago

Product Hunt

@ronef So so cool. Love it. Thanks for the breakdown.

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2yr ago

Congrats on the launch! The ability to create a reproducible environment without containers is impressive.

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@andreas_sohns Thank you! We appreciate the kind words

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2yr ago

Congrats to the Flox team on the launch! I've been following the product for some time now, and I'm excited to see it go more public. I haven't used it too much in anger (yet) because I'm too much of an old die-hard Nix fanboy to switch, but what I've seen is truly impressive when it comes to lowering the adoption bar.

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2yr ago

Flox

Maker

@theophane_hufschmitt Lots of love and will be patient until that day comes ;)

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2yr ago

Cypress.io

Congrats @ronef and team. My new default for new projects is a clean slate with Flox then add Python and Node. I immediately get the productive sense that I'm working in a clutter-free workspace.

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2yr ago

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