cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/34279957

guix shell sees to it that all of the dependencies (listed in the inputs and native-inputs sections) are available within the shell session it creates by downloading (or building, if necessary) the entire dependency tree.

Should you want/need more isolation from the host system, guix shell has you covered. The --pure flag will clear out most existing environments variables, such as $PATH, so that the resulting environment does not contain pointers to places like /usr. For more Docker-like isolation, the --container flag can be used, which will run the new shell session within a set of Linux namespaces so that the host system is inaccessible.