Flox Environments Guide

Working Style & Structure

• Use modular, idempotent bash functions in hooks
• Never, ever use absolute paths. Flox environments are designed to be reproducible. Use Flox's environment variables instead
• I REPEAT: NEVER, EVER USE ABSOLUTE PATHS. Don't do it. Use $FLOX_ENV for environment-specific runtime dependencies; use $FLOX_ENV_PROJECT for the project directory
• Name functions descriptively (e.g., setup_postgres())
• Consider using gum for styled output when creating environments for interactive use; this is an anti-pattern in CI
• Put persistent data/configs in $FLOX_ENV_CACHE
• Return to $FLOX_ENV_PROJECT at end of hooks
• Use mktemp for temp files, clean up immediately
• Do not over-engineer: e.g., do not create unnecessary echo statements or superfluous comments; do not print unnecessary information displays in [hook] or [profile]; do not create helper functions or aliases without the user requesting these explicitly

Configuration & Secrets