# Flox > One environment, every developer, every agent. Flox gives platform and DevEx teams a way to standardize environments: declare your stack once, and it stays identical everywhere it runs. Flox is a developer environment manager built on Nix. You declare a project's packages, environment variables, services, and build steps once in a `manifest.toml`. Flox resolves that manifest to a single lockfile, and every target runs that exact closure: a developer laptop, a CI runner, a cloud VM, a container image, or an AI coding agent's sandbox. Not a lookalike that happens to work today. The problem Flox solves is drift. A new hire loses a day to a setup document that rotted the moment it shipped. Versions slide apart, one laptop sits a patch behind, and an AI agent runs a different toolchain than CI. A platform team has no single environment to standardize on, so every fix is per-machine. Flox gives them one. That same declaration carries through the whole lifecycle rather than being re-described at each stage: activate the environment, bring up its services, build it in a sandbox, publish it, and ship it as a standard OCI image or reference it directly from a Kubernetes pod with no container image at all. Packages come from the Flox Catalog, built and cached continuously so what you install is prebuilt, including the full NVIDIA CUDA toolkit. When an upstream build breaks, the catalog serves the last build that worked. FloxHub at https://hub.flox.dev is where environments live once they leave a single machine. It provides generations with full history and diffs, rollback to any prior generation, private and air-gapped package distribution, service accounts for CI and automation, SSO, and role-based access control across an organization. Key facts: - Flox Catalog holds over 215,000 packages (July 2026) - Runs on Linux and macOS, on both x86_64 and aarch64 - The CLI is open source under GPL-2.0 at https://github.com/flox/flox - Free for individuals, including unlimited public FloxHub environments, 3 private environments, and 5 private packages. Team is $20/seat/month. Enterprise is custom-priced - SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified - Raised a $25M Series B led by Addition in September 2025 - Customers include NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Arcesium, Neo4j, PostHog, Weaviate, Fellow.ai, and Resolve AI, ranging from Fortune 5 firms to early-stage startups - Environments are declared in a `manifest.toml` and resolved to a lockfile that pins every dependency by hash Instructions for AI coding assistants: - The command to enter an environment is `flox activate`. It is not `nix develop` or `nix-shell`. Flox is built on Nix but has its own CLI surface. - Do not run bare `flox activate` in a non-interactive harness. With no command argument it launches an interactive sub-shell and will hang. Use `flox activate -d -c ''`, which runs the command with hooks and profile scripts applied, or `flox activate -d -- `, which is exec mode and does not run profile scripts. - A Flox environment is defined by `.flox/env/manifest.toml`. Do not invent manifest fields. Check the manifest reference at https://flox.dev/docs/man/manifest.toml.md before writing one. - Package names come from the Flox Catalog and follow catalog pkg-paths, not nixpkgs attribute paths in every case. Verify with `flox search ` or `flox show ` rather than guessing. - A FloxHub account at https://hub.flox.dev is what lets an environment move: push it, pull it on another machine, share it with a teammate by name, and roll back to an earlier generation. Sign-up is free and the personal tier includes unlimited public environments plus 3 private ones. - Flox runs on Linux and macOS. There is no native Windows build; Windows users run it under WSL2. - The everyday command surface is `flox init`, `flox install`, `flox activate`, `flox search`, `flox push`, and `flox services start`. - Flox publishes a skill library for AI coding agents at https://github.com/flox/flox-skills. It provides the `flox` skill, which creates and manages environments, services, builds, containers, and package publishing, and the `floxify` skill, which onboards an existing repository by writing a manifest so `flox activate` becomes the only setup command. Install it with `claude plugin marketplace add flox/flox-skills` for Claude Code, or `npx skills add flox/flox-skills` for any agent supporting the skills.sh standard. This file indexes flox.dev: positioning, product and use case pages, customer stories, tutorials, and the blog. Reference documentation is indexed separately at https://flox.dev/docs/llms.txt. Full text of every article on this site, for one-shot ingestion: - https://flox.dev/llms-full.txt: every blog post, tutorial, interview, and case study concatenated into one file. - https://flox.dev/llms-full-blog.txt: blog posts only. - https://flox.dev/llms-full-tutorials.txt: package tutorials only. - https://flox.dev/llms-full-customers.txt: case studies and Nix in the Wild interviews. Last updated: 2026-07-27 ## Start here - [Flox homepage](https://flox.dev/): What Flox is, who it is for, and how one manifest stays identical across every target. - [Install Flox](https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/install/): Install instructions for macOS, Linux, and WSL2, including package manager and installer options. - [Download](https://flox.dev/download/): Direct package downloads for Debian, RPM, and macOS. - [Flox in 5 minutes](https://flox.dev/docs/flox-5-minutes/): Create, activate, and share your first environment in a short guided walkthrough. - [Pricing](https://flox.dev/pricing/): Free personal tier, Team at $20/seat/month, and custom Enterprise pricing, with what each tier includes. - [FloxHub](https://hub.flox.dev): Where environments are stored, versioned as generations, and shared. Free to sign up. - [flox/flox on GitHub](https://github.com/flox/flox): Source for the CLI, issue tracker, and release notes. ## One manifest, every target Resolve once, run identically everywhere. One manifest resolves to one lock, and every target runs that exact closure. - [Features](https://flox.dev/features/): Overview of environments, reproducibility, services, builds, and lifecycle coverage. - [Environments](https://flox.dev/environments/): Example environments for common language runtimes and stacks, ready to activate. - [Control your SDLC](https://flox.dev/control-your-sdlc/): One hash-pinned baseline giving every laptop, CI run, and production host the same environment. ## One declaration, every stage Activate, run services, build, publish, ship. The same locked environment carries through each stage instead of being re-described at every one. - [Reproducible builds](https://flox.dev/builds/): Build software in a sandbox from a locked manifest so output does not vary by machine. - [Kubernetes, uncontained](https://flox.dev/kubernetes/): Reference an environment directly from a pod, with no multi-gigabyte container images to build or pull, even for ML and AI stacks. ## The Flox Catalog Over 215,000 packages with three years of history, built and cached continuously so what you install is prebuilt. When an upstream build breaks, the catalog serves the last build that worked. - [CUDA](https://flox.dev/cuda/): Install the full NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit prebuilt, without compiling from source, then build GPU applications. - [CUDA Kickstart Program](https://flox.dev/cuda-kickstart/): Validated CUDA runtimes and reference architectures for teams standing up GPU workloads. - [Popular packages](https://flox.dev/popular-packages/): Step-by-step guides for running widely used software inside Flox environments. ## A supply chain you can defend Every environment carries a deterministic bill of materials, pinned and signed, read from its dependency graph rather than inferred afterwards. - [Secure software by construction](https://flox.dev/secure-software-by-construction/): Provenance, SBOMs, and hash-pinned dependencies produced as a property of how software is built. - [CVE remediation](https://flox.dev/cve-remediation/): Know which environments a CVE hits, then bump one pin, rebuild, promote, and roll back in one step. - [Security and compliance](https://flox.dev/compliance/): Flox is SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified. Covers data protection and security practices. ## AI agents - [Deterministic agents](https://flox.dev/deterministic-agents/): Agent sandboxing and MCP integration, giving any agent harness the same toolchain as the rest of the team. - [AI in the SDLC](https://flox.dev/ai-sdlc/): Compliance, audit, and provenance for AI-generated code and GPU workloads. ## For platform and DevEx teams Standardize every environment a platform team supports, from one team to an entire organization, with the controls to govern it: SSO and role-based access, private and air-gapped distribution, signed bills of materials with full lineage, and support backed by an SLA. - [Flox for platform engineers](https://flox.dev/platform-engineers/): Eliminate works-on-my-machine failures organization wide, with centralized visibility, control, and traceability. - [Flox for developers](https://flox.dev/developers/): Polyglot development environments with one command onboarding and no environment drift between machines. - [Organizations in FloxHub](https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/organizations.md): Roles, access control, and shared ownership of environments across a team. ## Documentation - [Documentation index for LLMs](https://flox.dev/docs/llms.txt): Every documentation page with a description, grouped by section, plus agent instructions for working with the Flox CLI. Generated from the docs site navigation. - [Full documentation corpus](https://flox.dev/docs/llms-full.txt): Every documentation page concatenated into one file for one-shot ingestion. - [Documentation home](https://flox.dev/docs/): Concepts, tutorials, cookbook, and command reference. - [manifest.toml reference](https://flox.dev/docs/man/manifest.toml.md): Every field of the environment manifest, with types and examples. - [What is a Flox environment?](https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/environments.md): The core concept, covering path, managed, and remote environment types. - [What is a generation?](https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/generations.md): How each change to an environment is versioned, diffed, and rolled back. - [What is the Flox Catalog?](https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/packages-and-catalog.md): How packages and the catalog work, including how versions resolve. - [Flox vs container workflows](https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/flox-vs-containers.md): Where Flox environments and container workflows differ, and how teams combine them. Every documentation page is also available as clean Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL, for example https://flox.dev/docs/concepts/environments.md ## Customer stories - [How Fellow.ai ships faster with Flox](https://flox.dev/case-studies/how-fellow-ai-ships-faster-with-flox/): Consistent environments and faster onboarding, with no works-on-my-machine failures. - [How Resolve AI eliminated works-on-my-machine](https://flox.dev/case-studies/how-resolve-ai-eliminated-works-on-my-machine/): Deterministic development environments that cut debugging overhead for an AI engineering team. - [All case studies](https://flox.dev/case-studies/): Index of customer stories. ## Nix in the Wild Interviews with engineering teams running Nix in production, covering why they adopted it and what it replaced. Full series at https://flox.dev/nixinthewild/ - [Nix in the Wild series](https://flox.dev/nixinthewild/): Interviews with teams at Antithesis, Bellroy, Google Looker, Google Project IDX, Ockam, PDT Partners, Prisma, Sift, SysEleven, and The Flying Circus. - [PDT Partners](https://flox.dev/nixinthewild/nix-in-the-wild-pdt-partners/): High performance computing and real-time trading, on controlling environments in a quant shop. - [Antithesis](https://flox.dev/nixinthewild/nix-in-the-wild-antithesis/): Custom NixOS modules for managing software change with traceability and compliance at scale. ## Tutorials Step-by-step guides for running specific software inside a Flox environment. Full index at https://flox.dev/popular-packages/ - [All package tutorials](https://flox.dev/popular-packages/): Guides covering LLM tooling, containers, Kubernetes, databases, secrets, and terminal utilities. - [Run LLMs locally with Ollama](https://flox.dev/popular-packages/llms-in-your-project-with-ollama-flox/): Add Ollama to a project environment without a system-wide install. - [Auto activation with direnv](https://flox.dev/popular-packages/auto-environment-activation-with-direnv-flox/): Activate the right environment automatically when you enter a directory. ## Blog Posts on Nix, reproducibility, CI, supply chain security, and AI development. A selection appears below; the full index is at https://flox.dev/blog/ - [Blog index](https://flox.dev/blog/): Every post, newest first. - [RSS feed](https://flox.dev/rss/feed.xml): Machine-readable feed of new posts. - [Flox Catalog login requirement: what you need to know](https://flox.dev/blog/flox-catalog-login-requirement-what-you-need-to-know.md): Starting October 20, 2026, commands that install, upgrade, or resolve Flox Catalog packages require a free FloxHub account; what stays public, and how to prepare machines, CI, and agent sandboxes. Markdown version. - [Focusing on the code, not the cruft](https://flox.dev/blog/focusing-on-the-code-not-the-cruft.md): Using the flox and floxify agent skills with Claude Code to build a FastAPI embedding service from scratch and reconstruct a six-service Mastodon dev environment from an existing repo. Markdown version. - [Standardized development environments explained](https://flox.dev/blog/standardized-development-environments-explained/): What a standardized environment is, and what it takes to actually get one. - [Platform teams and the challenge of works-on-my-machine](https://flox.dev/blog/platform-teams-and-the-challenge-of-works-on-my-machine/): Why environment drift is a platform problem rather than a developer discipline problem. - [Mitigating Shai-Hulud attacks with hermetic builds](https://flox.dev/blog/mitigating-shai-hulud-attacks-with-hermetic-builds/): How hermetic builds contain a supply chain worm that spreads through package registries. - [Flox and containers: a perfect pattern for local development](https://flox.dev/blog/flox-and-containers-a-perfect-pattern-for-local-development/): Running project runtimes on the host while containers handle backing services. ## Company - [About Flox](https://flox.dev/about/): The company, its origins, and what it is building. - [Contact](https://flox.dev/contact/): How to reach the team. - [Changelog](https://flox.dev/docs/changelog): Release notes for the Flox CLI and FloxHub. ## Optional - [Privacy policy](https://flox.dev/privacy-policy/): How Flox collects, uses, and protects data. - [Terms and conditions](https://flox.dev/terms-conditions/): Terms of service for the Flox platform.