Devilbox vs Nix

Devilbox is a Dockerized LAMP and MEAN stack for local development on Linux, macOS, and Windows hosts. It supports an unlimited number of projects: adding a project directory creates a virtual host without restarting services. New projects get SSL certificates signed by Devilbox's certificate authority, and its built-in wildcard DNS makes project addresses available to the host system.

The stack supports Apache or Nginx with PHP, plus services such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and MongoDB. Configuration can be set globally, by service version, or for a specific project. Its intranet includes phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, phpRedMin, Adminer, OpcacheGui, and a GUI for viewing sent emails. Outgoing project email is intercepted and stored locally for review. After the required Docker images are first downloaded, Devilbox can run offline. Its documentation says official Docker images are built nightly and published with available security patches. The free plan is listed at free, with no price or usage limits stated on the opened pages.

Nix is a free package management and system configuration tool for creating reproducible, declarative systems. It builds packages in isolation to avoid undeclared dependencies and help keep builds consistent across machines. Users can define and share development and build environments across projects and languages, install software from URLs or source code, and use virtual machines for integration testing. Nix supports dependency resolution, lockfiles, workspaces and offline installation; its package formats include Nix expressions, derivations and flakes. The Nix Packages collection offers over 140,000 packages. The wider ecosystem supports remote builds and deployments, binary caches, cross compilation, atomic upgrades and rollbacks to earlier package versions. Nix runs on Linux and macOS, and on Windows through WSL2; multi-user Windows installation requires WSL systemd support. Documentation includes guides for GitHub Actions, Docker images, Terraform deployment, SSH provisioning and distributed builds. Nix is aimed at people familiar with command-line interfaces and plain-text editors, including developers, test engineers, DevOps engineers, system administrators, data scientists, students and open-source enthusiasts. It has no paid plan listed.