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.
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
@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
@memphys_sk Thank you! Flox aims to provide the same consistent development experience in both Continuous Integration and local development. Today you can use Flox in CI and get the same environment you do locally. It's also possible to use Continuous Deployment on those environments for interpreted languages. We'll be working on ways to make this even easier and support CD for compiled languages in the future.
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