In spirits it’s very similar to tool like bundler, maven, meson or uv in that it ensure a reproducible set of dependancies and their version, but on a more general scope including the tools ecosystem itself.

Flakes are now the standard way to use Nix.

see also

• Custom Cross Compiler with Nix

Using Flakes (Recommended)

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/nix
$ echo "experimental-features = nix-command flakes" >> ~/.config/nix/nix.conf
# Restart your shell again

It provide a more advanced Workflow for Using Flakes, targeting more specifically developer and project build repetability. see below

Create a new project directory

This directory will contain:

• your Zig code
• your flake.nix

$ mkdir zig-dev
$ cd zig-dev

Create the flake.nix file

A flake is defined entirely by this file.

$ touch flake.nix

Define the flake skeleton

{
  description = "Zig development environment";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs }:
  {
  };
}

Enter the Zig development environment

This create an isolated shell, taking into account the flake definition.

$ nix develop

flake-utils

flake-utils is a small helper library for Nix flakes that reduces boilerplate when writing flake.nix files.