If Nix is not detected when running a command, Devbox will automatically install it for you.
Don’t worry: You can use Devbox without needing to learn the Nix Language.
If you would like to install Nix yourself, we recommend the
Determinate Nix Installer.
To install WSL2 with the default Ubuntu distribution, open Powershell or Windows Command Prompt
as an administrator, and run:
wsl --install
If WSL2 is already installed, you can install Ubuntu by running
wsl --install -d Ubuntu
If you are running an older version of Windows, you may need to follow the
manual installation steps
to enable virtualization and WSL2 on your system.
See the official docs for more details.
Run the install script in your WSL2 terminal as a non-root user.Devbox will install Nix in single-user mode for WSL2 if not already present.
New releases of Devbox need to be updated in Nixpkgs before they are available for
installation. If you want to use the latest version of Devbox, you can install it using the
Nix Flake.
You can also install Devbox on a NixOS/Nixpkgs system using our Nix Flake. Using the Nix Flake can
help you access pre-releases and final releases of Devbox as soon as they are published.To get the latest version:
Devbox will notify you when a new version is available. To update to the latest released version of
Devbox, you can run devbox version update.If you installed Devbox with Nix, you can update Devbox via Nix using nix-env -u devbox, or
nix profile upgrade.You can find release notes and details on the
Releases page of the Devbox Github repo.
Rolling Back or Pinning a Specific Version of Devbox
You can rollback or pin the version of Devbox on your system using the DEVBOX_USE_VERSION
environment variable. For example, to use version 0.8.0:
export DEVBOX_USE_VERSION=0.8.0
Setting this variable will use the specified version of Devbox even if a newer version has been
installed on your machine.If you installed Devbox with Nixpkgs, you will need to pin Devbox in your profile or Nix
configuration. You can find the Nixpkg commits for previous versions of Devbox on
Nixhub.
