Releases · flox/flox

Changes

Using exit or exec in hook.on-activate now returns an error. Previously these would have exited the activation prematurely.

Fixes

flox containerize on macOS now works correctly with packages from FloxHub custom catalogs (fixes #3971)
flox activate no longer triggers interactive rm prompts when the user has alias rm='rm -i' in their shell configuration (fixes #3984)
Running flox activate with env -i now works again, fixing a regression that was introduced in v1.9.0.
Error messages are now correctly displayed when a package cannot be installed, fixing a regression that was introduced in v1.8.3.
Improved the error messaging when a package cannot be installed due to incorrect public key configuration.
Error reporting is now enabled for the executive background process to improve reliability.

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Changes to `flox activate`

TLDR

The activation subsystem was rewritten from Bash to Rust, and process parentage was reworked to allow automated invocations of Flox (such as third-party service managers) to track processes. There are a few breaking changes to make note of, as well as a number of performance improvements and a few outstanding bug fixes.

[breaking change] It is recommended to exit all current activations or reboot after installing, especially if you are using Flox services.
[breaking change] flox activate -- <command> will now exec() the provided command without invoking your user shell or profile scripts, which is both more efficient and maintains the same PID throughout.
A new flox activate -c "<command_script>" feature has been added which provides the previous semantics of --. This can be used to run scripts in your default shell where flox activate -- <shell> -c "<command_script>" might have previously been used.

Additional changes to `activate`

The core of activation has been rewritten from Bash to Rust which has reduced the startup latency for activations, in addition to improving reliability and testability.
flox activate now maintains the same PID all the way through to the command or interactive shell that you execute which makes it possible for automated invocations of Flox (such as third-party service managers) to track the process.
Activation hooks will now re-run whenever the modification of an environment is activated, even if it has been activated previously. Concurrent activations of modified environments will block on each other with a warning to prevent conflicts between concurrent runs of the activation hooks.
Concurrent activations of an environment in different modes (e.g. run and dev) are now prevented. If you find yourself accidentally using the wrong mode then set options.activate.mode in the environment manifest. This avoids a bug where exiting an activation in one mode could stop services even when an activation in a different mode is still running (#2357).
flox-activations executive replaces flox-watchdog, which is responsible for tracking state for activations. Only one instance of the process will be started for all activations of an environment, it’s now more efficient at tracking attachments to an activation, and more reliable at recovering from failures
- Fixes #2764
- Fixes #3896

Services

Services and their child processes are now parented to flox-activations executive which makes them easier to identify in process listings. Linux platforms additionally enable a sub-reaper to ensure that zombie processes get parented and reaped by the executive.
Services are no longer restarted from scratch when there are no modifications to the environment, which speeds up some uses of flox services start and flox services restart.
Impure environment variables (not set in your manifest) will no longer leak into services in subsequent flox services start, flox services restart, and flox activate -s invocations.
A warning will be return if flox services start or flox services restart are called from hook.on-activate in order to prevent deadlocks. If you want to start services with an activation then flox activate -s should be used.

Other features and fixes

flox init detects .node-version files in addition to .nvmrc for Node.js version detection.
flox init prefers LTS (even-numbered) Node.js versions when auto-detecting which package to install.
Commands without explicit --dir or --remote flags no longer error when they detect an active FloxHub environment.
Expired FloxHub tokens are no longer automatically deleted, so activating environments under your handle no longer triggers a "do you want to trust this environment?" prompt after expiry, and a persistent reminder to re-authenticate is shown instead.

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Notable features and fixes

This release contains a hotfix fixing installations on Linux that have a pre-existing Nix installation. Failure logs would include:

++ diskutil info -plist /nix
/usr/share/flox/include/after-install.bash: line 184: diskutil: command not found
++ plutil -extract VolumeUUID raw -
/usr/share/flox/include/after-install.bash: line 184: plutil: command not found

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This release addresses several bugs and adds new improvements, including:

Improvements

LaunchDaemons on macOS are now signed and are associated with Flox in System Preferences. Items no longer show up as "sh - Item from unidentified developer."
Environments can now be initialized directly on FloxHub using flox init --reference <owner/name>.
First-time users of flox install are guided to fetch or create their FloxHub-based default environment.
Packages are downloaded in parallel when building environments, with the maximum number of concurrent downloads configurable via FLOX_MAX_PARALLEL_DOWNLOADS.
Running flox list -a now displays installed outputs for each package.
Activation messages now explicitly indicate whether the environment is ahead of, behind, or diverged from the upstream FloxHub state with specific action suggestions.
Icons used in CLI output have been updated to use unicode characters instead of emojis.

Fixes

Running flox install during onboarding now correctly reuses existing FloxHub default environments instead of failing.
Error messages when attempting to rename a FloxHub environment now provide the FloxHub URL and next steps.
Running flox pull no longer signals divergence when the local environment is exclusively ahead of the remote state.

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Features

The manifest now accepts reference as an alias for remote in include.environments[] when including other environments.

Fixes

FloxHub environments no longer trigger unnecessary relocking delays when first opened.
flox activate no longer modifies lockfiles when the only differences are formatting changes.
FloxHub environment detection now provides clearer error handling when environment references cannot be resolved.

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Features

Running flox pull without arguments in an activation now pulls the last activated environment. If there's an environment in the current directory, flox pull will prompt
flox show now displays additional package metadata including catalog, license, outputs (with default install markers), supported systems, source URL, and publication date
JAVA_HOME is now set for environments that contain bin/java

Fixes

Fixed a bug where flox build would fail when running a "pure" sandbox build that created outputs containing directories with mode 555
flox activate --trust now propagates trust to the includes of remote environments

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@HuaDeity

Changes for using FloxHub environments

Environments on FloxHub could previously be referred to using -r | --remote <owner/name>, but using environments with --remote was often too slow due to the fact that it always required a network call.

--remote is being deprecated, and a new option -r | --reference <owner/name> is being introduced to allow using FloxHub environments without a network call or having to manually run a flox pull. When the first command using --reference is used, the environment will be fetched from FloxHub and cached locally. We'll refer to that copy of the environment as the local FloxHub environment, and the copy on FloxHub as the upstream FloxHub environment.

Subsequent commands using --reference will use the local FloxHub environment, which means that for example repeat activations of flox activate -r owner/name will be much faster without requiring network access.

If changes are made to the local FloxHub environment (e.g. using flox edit -r owner/name), those changes can be pushed to FloxHub with flox push --reference owner/name. To get the latest upstream changes before activating, run flox pull -r owner/name before flox activate -r owner/name.

Previously flox pull --remote owner/name would create a .flox directory in the current directory. Using the new option flox pull --reference owner/name now instead updates the local FloxHub environment. To pull an environment and create a .flox directory, use flox pull owner/name without --reference.

Other features and fixes

Added a --label option to flox containerize for specifying custom OCI image labels on both Linux and macOS. Labels are applied to the generated container image on both Linux and macOS. Labels specified with --label are merged with any labels defined in the environment's [containerize.config] section in the manifest
```
# Single label
flox containerize --label app=myapp

# Multiple labels
flox containerize --label app=myapp --label version=1.0 --label env=production
```
Fixed a bug where metrics buffer would grow indefinitely, causing continual network traffic. Thanks to @HuaDeity

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Fixes

This release fixes a bug where programs would fail with Cannot allocate memory in static TLS block due to new nixpkgs PIE defaults. This fixes issues with rustfmt on aarch64-linux and improves overall stability of dev-mode activations.

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@ryansch

Notable features and fixes

This release addresses several bugs and adds new improvements, including:

Leading slashes are now removed from install IDs generated by flox install so that the full pkg-path (including custom catalog names) don't clutter the manifest. The full pkg-path is still shown by flox list.
Changes to Flakes are now correctly applied when using flox install and flox upgrade.
Disabled .env support in services (process-compose) so that environment variables defined in [vars] and [services.*.vars] aren't shadowed. Users can still source .env files from hook.on-activate for the correct precedence. Thanks to @ryansch for the report and diagnosis.
Fixed an issue where flox push incorrectly reported that the environment had been published when no changes were present. Thanks to @fleat for the report.

Maintenance

Nix has been upgraded internally from 2.28.4 to 2.31.2
process-compose has been upgraded internally from 1.73.0 to 1.75.2

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@mrswastik-robot

Notable features and fixes

This release addresses several bugs and adds new improvements, including:

Added flox auth token command to display your current floxhub token (useful for automation)
Don't print upgrade notification when running flox activate -- <cmd>
Add flox pull --copy --generation option to pull-copy a specific generation from an environment hosted on https://hub.flox.dev
Fixed garbling of escape codes in bare flox command output
The latest stable release of Flox is now tracked by the flox/flox:latest branch (formally a tag). This is because tags have a bit more permanence and a branch is expected to move over time. This is primarily useful for flake-based installations.

Thank you to our community contributions this release

Better error handling in flox push when no changes are present (@mrswastik-robot)
Added trailing newlines in manifest and lockfile (@mrswastik-robot)
Nicer alignment in flox show output (@mrswastik-robot)
flox list now includes the catalog in the package path (@mrswastik-robot)

Releases: flox/flox

v1.9.1

Changes

Fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.9.0

Changes to flox activate

TLDR

Additional changes to activate

Services

Other features and fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.8.4

Notable features and fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.8.3

Improvements

Fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.8.2

Features

Fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.8.1

Features

Fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.8.0

Changes for using FloxHub environments

Other features and fixes

Download Links

Contributors

Uh oh!

v1.7.8

Fixes

Download Links

Uh oh!

v1.7.7

Notable features and fixes

Maintenance

Download Links

Contributors

Uh oh!

v1.7.6

Notable features and fixes

Thank you to our community contributions this release

Download Links

Contributors

Uh oh!

Changes to `flox activate`

Additional changes to `activate`