devcontainers-nix
Dev Containers & Nix Environments
Reproducible, portable development environments that eliminate environment drift.
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when:
- Onboarding new developers (zero-to-productive in minutes)
- Standardizing toolchains across a team
- Eliminating "works on my machine" problems
- Setting up CI environments that match local dev
- Creating ephemeral, disposable dev environments
Environment execution boundaries
Devcontainer features, lifecycle hooks, Nix shell hooks, direnv and dependency installers execute code; inspect the complete configuration, locked inputs and source before activation. Do not run moving downloaded installers or accept a hash mismatch by deleting/recreating state; verify publisher/version and integrity first. Avoid privileged Docker-in-Docker and host sockets for untrusted repositories. Never pass production credentials into a development environment by default. Offline operation needs every dependency/artifact already available locally; a lockfile alone is insufficient. nix build/run need corresponding outputs, which the devShell-only example does not define.