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Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

nixery.dev

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Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#41

Post by SuperSandro2000 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #40
nickysielicki wrote: post #12

I don’t know if it’s just because I hopped on the bandwagon in the past few months, but it really is starting to feel like Nix is gaining momentum. You can use it on Mac, WSL, Ubuntu multiuser, Docker, in an nspawn container, or through NixOS on a drive. You can build a livecd iso or a Raspberry Pi image from the same flake that you use for everything else. I work in embedded with Yocto every day, and I can’t help bu…

To all the folks using Nix at scale: How are you doing it? Are you still using Kubernetes and friends, custom images, etc? How are you deploying apps or making changes to your Nix instances across a fleet of servers?

I a know a group which deploys ~10 machines and ~30 Containers mostly with shell and custom CI. Nothing fancy.

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#42

Post by ilovefood »

This is absolutely fantastic, I can't count the times where I needed to debug some sidecar/envoy/tls thing or some network connectivity between two different systems and needed a specific tool (nmap, telnet, ..) within a docker container to debug that and couldn't (or didn't want to) rebuild the container with the missing dependency or package. Really hits a sweet spot and might make life a bit easier for me. Thanks for sharing it!

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#43

Post by SuperSandro2000 »

xvector wrote: post #28
BreakfastB0b wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently adopted it at my company for managing local dev machines, project environments, and CI. It definitely has some warts, often the best documentation is “read the source code”, but man is it an awesome tool. I’ve switched all of my machines / servers over to it and I’ll never look back. Now I’m looking at my iPad and iPhone and wishing I could manage them through Nix too. I’d put it at a comparable difficult…

How can one use Nix to manage project-specific dependencies that typically store Dotfiles in annoying locations like the home folder? I am aware of home-manager but am not sure how (or if) it would work for per-project dot file management.

Can you name a tool which does not allow per project local configuration files?

One option to do it per project with hm would be to add new options which set certain configuration options.

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#44

Post by abathur »

JamesSwift wrote: post #39
nickysielicki wrote: post #12

I don’t know if it’s just because I hopped on the bandwagon in the past few months, but it really is starting to feel like Nix is gaining momentum. You can use it on Mac, WSL, Ubuntu multiuser, Docker, in an nspawn container, or through NixOS on a drive. You can build a livecd iso or a Raspberry Pi image from the same flake that you use for everything else. I work in embedded with Yocto every day, and I can’t help bu…

I love nix, but you're a lot more optimistic and forgiving of its cons than I am :D To be clear, I've not used NixOS and it might be a more reasonable experience. Nix package manager though is the most useful tool I have integrated into my dev-life and also the one I am most hesitant to recommend to anyone else. The UX of the whole thing still has a long way to go and the initial installation experience on Mac has be…

> and the initial installation experience on Mac has been all over the place quality-wise in recent years.

In minor defense of this, Apple making the root read-only threw a pretty big wrench in things. There are a lot of little reasons (some understandable and some exasperating) it took so long to adjust, but all of them were exacerbated by the amount of new logistical complexity required (and the amount of experimentation necessary to figure it out).

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#45

Post by sjustinas »

imhoguy wrote: post #20
nickysielicki wrote: post #12

I don’t know if it’s just because I hopped on the bandwagon in the past few months, but it really is starting to feel like Nix is gaining momentum. You can use it on Mac, WSL, Ubuntu multiuser, Docker, in an nspawn container, or through NixOS on a drive. You can build a livecd iso or a Raspberry Pi image from the same flake that you use for everything else. I work in embedded with Yocto every day, and I can’t help bu…

qq: Any good tutorials to get up to speed with NixOS with 64-bit Raspberry Pi Zero 2 please? I have a plan to thinker with some off-grid IoT this year, good moment to try something new, like Nix, than continue with Ansible which unfortunately gets out of hand with very long lasting installations - no implicit cleanup of removed resources and lack of build reproducibility (apt-get update issue really).

Not a tutorial, but the unofficial wiki has info on Raspberry Pi and other ARM SBCs: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#47

Post by colordrops »

BreakfastB0b wrote: post #18
nickysielicki wrote: post #12

I don’t know if it’s just because I hopped on the bandwagon in the past few months, but it really is starting to feel like Nix is gaining momentum. You can use it on Mac, WSL, Ubuntu multiuser, Docker, in an nspawn container, or through NixOS on a drive. You can build a livecd iso or a Raspberry Pi image from the same flake that you use for everything else. I work in embedded with Yocto every day, and I can’t help bu…

We recently adopted it at my company for managing local dev machines, project environments, and CI. It definitely has some warts, often the best documentation is “read the source code”, but man is it an awesome tool. I’ve switched all of my machines / servers over to it and I’ll never look back. Now I’m looking at my iPad and iPhone and wishing I could manage them through Nix too. I’d put it at a comparable difficult…

There's an experiment Nix fork of Temrux for Android, if you want to try on mobile. Good luck on an iPhone though.

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#48

Post by colordrops »

nickysielicki wrote: post #12

I don’t know if it’s just because I hopped on the bandwagon in the past few months, but it really is starting to feel like Nix is gaining momentum. You can use it on Mac, WSL, Ubuntu multiuser, Docker, in an nspawn container, or through NixOS on a drive. You can build a livecd iso or a Raspberry Pi image from the same flake that you use for everything else. I work in embedded with Yocto every day, and I can’t help bu…

I was afraid of Nix before I adopted it based on what I've read. Now that I've taken the leap, there is no going back. Other operating systems are crude dinosaurs in comparison. Once you get past the learning curve and the initial setup (which can be steep), your system will be far more stable and easy to maintain than anything out there. Declarative OS builds are the future, whether it's Nix or something else.

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#49

Post by frafra »

stabbles wrote: post #34

I like how they optimize for layer reuse, but at the same time, nix doesn't really fit docker layer caching because it's better. With a unique prefix per package, you don't need stacking of layers. You can just download a bunch of packages in parallel, extract them in parallel, and finally "merge" the prefixes to get those combined bin/ and lib/ dirs.

> You can just download a bunch of packages in parallel, extract them in parallel, and finally "merge" the prefixes to get those combined bin/ and lib/ dirs.

docker pull achieves the same result: layers are fetched in parallel, and they are extracted using pgiz (parallel gzip). It just uses a pre-defined order, which does not harm performances, but it is not useful either in case nixery is used.

Re: Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix

#50

Post by JamesSwift »

abathur wrote: post #44
JamesSwift wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love nix, but you're a lot more optimistic and forgiving of its cons than I am :D To be clear, I've not used NixOS and it might be a more reasonable experience. Nix package manager though is the most useful tool I have integrated into my dev-life and also the one I am most hesitant to recommend to anyone else. The UX of the whole thing still has a long way to go and the initial installation experience on Mac has be…

> and the initial installation experience on Mac has been all over the place quality-wise in recent years. In minor defense of this, Apple making the root read-only threw a pretty big wrench in things. There are a lot of little reasons (some understandable and some exasperating) it took so long to adjust, but all of them were exacerbated by the amount of new logistical complexity required (and the amount of experimen…

For sure, that part is understandable and the current install is pretty simple since FDE avoids previous steps. But for a while it was _really_ difficult to find the needed info (had to read through Github issues and find specific comments embedded in extremely long threads)
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