Nix is a package manager designed to allow for completely reproducible builds. It allows for developers to have reproducible build environments in order to ensure consistency. For more information, see https://nixos.org/.
Nix development shells can be used to get development environments which can be accessed using the nix-shell command.
Firstly, we must define a function. Nix expressions are written in a functional language (also called Nix) and use the function as their basic unit. This one takes a parameter called pkgs with a default value of the primary Nix package collection.
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:Now, we can create a shell using the pkgs.mkShell function. This function creates the shell that will be accessed and defines properties of it. In our case, we use the buildInputs parameter to include our build dependencies (ie. Golang) in this shell.
pkgs.mkShell {
buildInputs = with pkgs; [ go ];
}