blog/content/posts/2022-03-03-clangd-in-nix.md
2023-02-04 01:21:21 -06:00

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title = "Clangd in Nix"
date = 2022-03-03
tags = ["nixos"]
+++
I've been using [Nix][NixOS] a lot recently since it handles dependency
management very cleanly, but one gripe that I've been having is that when I'm
doing C/C++ development work using `nix develop`, all my dependencies are
actually in the Nix store in `/nix`, so my [clangd] editor plugin won't be able
to find them.
Fortunately, clangd supports looking for a file called `compile_commands.json`,
which describes the compilation commands used for each file, with absolute paths
for all dependencies.
For [CMake]-based projects, there's an option to dump this information
automatically into the build directory, which I typically then symlink into my
project's root directory for my editor to find and apply to my files. Here's the
snippet:
```cmake
# Generate the `compile_commands.json` file.
set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS ON CACHE INTERNAL "")
if(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES
${CMAKE_CXX_IMPLICIT_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES})
endif()
```
[NixOS]: https://nixos.org/
[clangd]: https://clangd.llvm.org/
[CMake]: https://cmake.org/