What problem are you trying to solve?

Hi,
thanks for devbox. It is great.

It is frustrating however, to not have the devbox packages instantly available in a nixos-rebuild build-vm (nor in a custom NixOS ISO).

I would like to use devbox as my primary package manager for apps and tools. But this workflow completely breaks down because I cannot test small changes to my system config in a build-vm because redownloading all the devbox packages is prohibitively expensive time-wise. As I understand it, devbox uses nix packages under the hood. So it would be absolutely FANTASTIC to have those nix-store-paths available in the VM as well instead of redownloading them after every rebuild. It would also be nice to have them available in the ISO when I generate it from my system config but that is secondary.

What solution would you like?

So telling devbox a directory where to keep an always current "devbox-packages.nix" (with all the pinned nix packages devbox resolved and installed) generated and updated by devbox in a format that I can import in my configuration.nix would be perfect.

I can run a refresh-global in the VM to give devbox the chance to wire everything up and keep to the devbox workflow. It would also have its last devbox.json and devbox.lock available. I would be happy to just have the nix-store-paths magically available during "ensuring packages are installed"

Alternatives you've considered

If that's not possible, I would appreciate a more hacky way as well. Maybe how I can write a shell script to copy over the relevant nix files from devbox to my nixos config dir and import them myself or some brute-force nix-way of letting NixOS know about all the nix-store paths to have them available in the build or even mounting the devbox-installed nix-store-paths somehow along with the system build. (I don't know much about the internals of nix and devbox)

Any help is appreciated.

I also considered setting up a nix cache server. That would speed things up slightly but still involve a lot of useless copying. Making NixOS properly aware of the packages or at least mounting them directly is the better way.