Install system packages

When using some modules or tools, you may want to install some packages. Unfortunately, due to security reasons, you can't run commands using sudo in CodeSandbox Repositories - but you can use Nix as a drop-in replacement. You can read about this more on the workspace limitations page.

Fortunately, Nix (opens in a new tab) provides most of the packages that you will likely need. You just have to replace the commands for sudo apt-get install or sudo apt install with nix-env -i - that's all. You can check out the available packages in Nix on https://search.nixos.org/packages (opens in a new tab).

For example, to install Google Chrome on Debian, you would use sudo apt install chromium. In CodeSandbox Repositories, just run nix-env -i chromium and you will get the same result.

As an alternative approach to installing packages, you can define a file in the root of your project called csb.nix and configure which packages should be automatically installed from the Nix package store (opens in a new tab). To use this configuration on every branch, you have to commit this file back to your main branch.

See an example configuration below:

with import <nixpkgs> {};
 
stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "csb";
    buildInputs = [
        chromium
        postgres
    ];
    shellHook = ''
        export PATH="$PWD/node_modules/.bin/:$PATH"
    '';
}