I open signal and find emojis in there.

Yay, and documenting flakes. I was afraid they weren’t going to.

Are you just after a dev environment? Or are you looking to make lemmy a nix module, so you could make it a service on a nixos machine?

I made some flakes that might be a starting point for nix develop.

https://github.com/bburdette/lemmy/tree/flake.nix

https://github.com/bburdette/lemmy-ui/tree/flake.nix

Both repos require git submodule init and git submodule update .

After nix develop, I was able to build the rust with cargo build.

The lemmy-ui one you have to npm install pnpm so it makes a node_modules dir, then you can exit and reenter nix develop to get it to set the path. I used nodejs_20 but you might not need to. When I run it with pnpm dev, it complains about missing translation files. Some files got installed with a submodule, but maybe they’re in the wrong place? dunno, stopped there.

Beyond that, I would try using their docker compose thing. Probably that will use the compiled typescript and/or rust code so you can work in a normal env and have those containers use your code. Haven’t tried it.