🚀 Getting Started

This walkthrough takes you from zero to an activated flk environment in eight steps. Wherever you see Flik (the magenta bird) animate in your terminal, it’s a real operation in progress — flk update, flk export, the pin-fetch inside flk add. The spinner clears itself when work finishes; you can disable color entirely with NO_COLOR=1.

1. Initialize Your Project

# Auto-detect project type and create flake.nix
flk init

# Or specify a template
flk init --template rust
flk init --template python
flk init --template node
flk init --template go

Supported auto-detection:

• Cargo.toml → Rust template
• package.json → Node.js template
• pyproject.toml or requirements.txt → Python template
• go.mod → Go template

2. Add Packages

# Search for packages
flk search ripgrep

# Get detailed package info and versions
flk deep-search ripgrep

# Add packages to your environment
flk add ripgrep
flk add git
flk add neovim

# Or add pinned versions
flk add ripgrep --version '15.1.0'
flk add git --version '2.42.0'

3. Add Custom Commands

# Add inline commands
flk command add test "cargo test --all"
flk command add dev "npm run dev"

4. Manage Environment Variables

# Add environment variables
flk env add DATABASE_URL "postgresql://localhost/mydb"
flk env add API_KEY "your-api-key"

# List all environment variables
flk env list

# Remove an environment variable
flk env remove API_KEY

5. Enter Your Development Environment

flk activate

Your custom commands and environment variables will be automatically available!

6. Generate completions

# Generates the completion file and prints it
flk completions

# Install the generated completions to the detected shell
flk completions --install

Follow the instructions after the command to make the completions available for you.

7. Attach to your direnv (optional)

If you use direnv, you can set it up to automatically load your flk environment when you enter the project directory.

# Generates a .envrc file for direnv with use flake command
flk direnv init

#or

# Add the direnv hook to an existing project
flk direnv attach

if you ever want to detach the direnv hook, you can run:

flk direnv detach

8. Switch / Refresh your environment

Add the following to your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.) to enable switching and refreshing of your flk environment when you navigate between project directories: e.g. Bash

eval "$(flk hook bash)"

Currently supported shells are: bash, zsh and fish.

Next Steps

Core Concepts Commands