Setting up the 40 y/o virgin stack

02 Aug, 2025

How I got my Rust project working with Hyprland and NixOS

I recently bought a thinkpad to use as my personal linux box for building out some low level projects and, after many config iterations, I landed on using nixOS with hyprland. While I've enjoyed it so far, I was surprised by how difficult it was to get one of my Rust projects up and running. The solution ended up being dead simple but I have a good feeling I'm going to need this again in the future.

tldr: use shell.nix

After a whole day, I realized that creating a shell.nix file in my project root fixed my openssl issues. Here's what I ended up using:

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

pkgs.mkShell {
  buildInputs = [
    pkgs.openssl
    pkgs.pkg-config
    pkgs.cargo
    pkgs.rustc
  ];

  shellHook = ''
    export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR=${pkgs.openssl.out}/lib
    export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR=${pkgs.openssl.dev}/include
    export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${pkgs.openssl.dev}/lib/pkgconfig
  '';
}

And here are my rust specific packages I have in my configuration.nix:

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
     rustc
     rustup
     rust-analyzer
     cargo
     openssl
     pkg-config
  ]

Your mileage my vary on this one but these seemed to get me unstuck.

Now all you need to do is run nix-shell in your project and you should be good to go!