Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

Post by georgyo » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #146

georgyo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of questions - What is the story in nix for packaging untagged branches of software If you want to do unreleased software, you would create overlays that added them. You're overlays most likely would not need to define the build, just create an override of the one in nixpkgs with a new source: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-to-override-package-versio... - Does the nix hash account for dependencies onl…

> Nix only writes new files to a remote store. As such nix caches can be served by anything that can serve files. I personally upload to S3 and have artifactory use that as a remote. What about the maintenance side, though, like being able to clean/reap old builds from the cache, reason about which ones are part of important/supported chains vs throwaway builds from merge pipelines, etc?

Post by jeofken » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #104

georgyo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used nix for two years now for both work and personal purposes, I agree. Though I have also come to think nix is doing things in much better ways than AppImage, Docker, Snap, Flatpack, and others. I won't focus on the good parts, but focus on your comment. Nix has three things that I think are confusing and took me an embarrassing long time to grok, and I find other people confused by as well. 1. Where does th…

> Bonus 4. In nix it is really easy to build single language applications. However if you need to mix two, finding good docs or examples is really hard. IE, if you want to build the javascript front end of your web app as well as the python backend. These combinations need at least two derivations, and how to make it happen is bespoke every time. For anything that doesn't fit a common nixpkgs function (like `buildPyt…

    puts “Hello World”

    let pkgs = import  {}; in
    pkgs.runCommand "my-app"
      {
        buildInputs = [pkgs.ruby];
      }
      ''
      pwd && ls;
      ruby ./program.rb
      ''

Post by mikepurvis » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

georgyo wrote: post #161

mikepurvis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nix only writes new files to a remote store. As such nix caches can be served by anything that can serve files. I personally upload to S3 and have artifactory use that as a remote. What about the maintenance side, though, like being able to clean/reap old builds from the cache, reason about which ones are part of important/supported chains vs throwaway builds from merge pipelines, etc?

Ah, there is no method. With S3 you can create file lifecycles that will move them to cheaper storage and eventually delete them. You could potentially create two buckets. One for throw away pipeline builds, and another for when things graduate to something you want to keep. It wouldn't be very hard to make some tooling, the files in the cache have almost all the metadata you need: http://cache.nixos.org/0ljamf3irbya…

Post by thibran » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #9

I spend a few hours looking at nix about a year ago and found it impenetrable. I simply do not grok the syntax or what the functions do. I tried searching for the functions shown in the examples on the website to no avail. I searched packages, options, and even resorted to ctrl-f while clicking through the site "documentation"... It sounds awesome, but its in dire need of some better documentation if it wants to be a…

Post by throwaway894345 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #137

throwaway894345 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I think nix-env is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to bad upfront experiences. If you try to make a Go package, for example, you end up having to provide a hash. To generate the hash `vendorSha256`, you have to run `nix-prefetch`, but that program is broken on MacOS. I mentioned elsewhere that I spent a weekend working with the Nix discord to try to install VS Code with some extensions for Rust…

If you try to make a Go package, for example, you end up having to provide a hash. To generate the hash `vendorSha256`, you have to run `nix-prefetch`, but that program is broken on MacOS. You can also stub the hash (e.g. with lib.fakeSha256 ). nix-build will fail with a hash mismatch and tell you the correct hash. I mentioned elsewhere that I spent a weekend working with the Nix discord to try to install VS Code wit…