Bix - Bitcoin Development Environment

Overview

This flake is designed primarily as a devShell rather than for building a specific derivation. It provides:

• All dependencies from nixpkgs needed to build all Bitcoin Core modules
• Modern LLVM toolchain
• Cross-platform support (Linux and MacOS x64 + aarch64)

Features

Build System

We use a slightly opinionated Clang/LLVM-based build system:

• CMake + Ninja - Fast, parallel builds
• LLVM/Clang 20 toolchain
• ccache

Dependencies

All Bitcoin Core dependencies from nixpkgs:

• Boost
• libevent
• SQLite
• ZeroMQ
• Cap'n Proto
• QR code generation

Development Tools

• Debugging: GDB (Linux) / LLDB (macOS)
• Tracing: SystemTap, BCC, bpftrace (Linux)
• Linting: flake8, mypy, vulture, codespell
• Misc: clang-format, clang-tidy and friends

Build Capabilities

• All Bitcoin Core modules from nixpkgs dependencies (Linux)
  • On MacOS the USDT component is not possible to build
• All modules excluding QT using depends

Usage

Enter Development Shell

nix develop

Build Bitcoin Core

Once in the development shell, you can build Bitcoin Core using either approach:

Using nixpkgs dependencies

cmake -B build
# On Linux build all modules with:
# cmake -B build --preset dev-mode
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

Using depends system (excludes GUI)

TRIPLET=$(./depends/config.guess)
make -C depends -j$(nproc) NO_QT=1
cmake -B build --toolchain depends/"$TRIPLET"/toolchain.cmake
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

Quick Test with Docker

To quickly test the development environment using Docker:

docker run --pull=always -it nixos/nix
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin && cd bitcoin
nix develop github:bitcoin-dev-tools/bix --extra-experimental-features flakes --extra-experimental-features nix-command --no-write-lock-file
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

Platform Support

Platform	Architecture	Build	Tracing
Linux	x86_64	✅	✅
Linux	aarch64	✅	✅
MacOS	x86_64	✅	❌
MacOS	aarch64	✅	❌

Environment Variables

The shell automatically sets:

• CMAKE_GENERATOR=Ninja - Use Ninja build system
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH - Includes Cap'n Proto libraries
• LOCALE_ARCHIVE - Proper locale support (Linux)

Requirements

• Nix with flakes enabled

Contributing

This flake uses nixpkgs stable (25.05) for reproducible builds. Format code with:

nix fmt .