Setup development environment

This section contains some information that might be relevant for you when setting up a corrosion development environment. Depending on your computer setup your experience will vary.

We try to document any quirks in development here. If you find yourself having to adjust something in order to be able to work on corrosion, please let us know/ open a PR! Thank you!

Dependencies with Nix

The corrosion repository comes with a flake.nix file, which can build the main corrosion binary, load development dependencies, and serve a local mdbook server for the book (that you're reading right now!).

If you're not familiar with Nix you can learn more about it here: https://nixos.org.

You will have to enable the "experimental-features" flag for Nix. You can do so by creating a configuration at ~/.config/nix/nix.conf:

extra-experimental-features = nix-command flakes

Afterwards you can:

• run nix build to build the corrosion command and all dependent crates. The final binary can then be found under ./result/
• run nix develop to get a development shell for corrosion. Note: this will use a shell hook to update the limit of open file descriptors via ulimit. Make sure that your system is configured to allow this without requiring privileges!
• run nix develop .#mdbook-shell to start the book development server