NixOS + Julia

General Usage
1

Does anyone have a good modern setup for NixOS + Julia? recently switched my linux distro over from pop_os! and overall I like the declarative philosophy, and for 90% of things i can get it to “just work,” but Julia is another story. I found this thread from awhile ago, but I was curious if there were any updates in this space.

Edit:
Sorry my original post was far too vague. I’m installing Julia on a per-directory basis using flakes. My bigger issue has been VSCode integration and Pkg being able to build libraries that are part of my Project.toml file. I was able to fix it using this flake configuration:

{
  description = "Julia dev env with libquadmath";

  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: let
    system = "x86_64-linux";
    pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };

    # Hardcoded known-good libquadmath path
    gccLibPath = "/nix/store/gv7z0km39q3fgzavpic8vrl7smh5n2w6-gcc-14.2.1.20250322-lib/lib";
  in {
    devShells.${system}.default = pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        pkgs.julia_111
        pkgs.gcc13          # still good for headers and general usage
        pkgs.libffi
        pkgs.zlib
      ];
      
  shellHook = ''
    export JULIA_DEPOT_PATH=$(pwd)/.julia_depot
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${gccLibPath}:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    export LD_PRELOAD=${gccLibPath}/libquadmath.so.0
    echo "Notebook and REPL now forced to preload libquadmath"
  '';
    };
  };
}

I then put this in my main flake.nix

  # auto run nix develop
  programs.direnv.enable = true;
  programs.direnv.nix-direnv.enable = true;

My biggest issue from here was just getting it to work with notebooks in VSCode. My only oslution has been to open code from my direnv shell. Not my favorite fix but it works for now.

2

I believe @MilesCranmer reported it to work here after some patches:

3

I believe that was for nix on Mac, Julia is in nixpkgs so I would have thought it would be easy to install on nixos.