Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#1

Post by rkrzr » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
tech.channable.com

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#2

Post by bennyp101 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

As an aside, I've just started trying to move my laptop to NixOS this past week, so far it seems pretty nice. I have a Macbook as well, and I think I should be able to share the Nix stuff with that - which would be cool.

As for the article, I hadn't actually considered using it as a replacement for Ansible etc - but I could see why it might work better. I could pin packages etc to the versions, and get the exact same thing each time - no guarentee with ansible etc that the apt repository hasn't been updated since the last install.

I think the whole Nix thing is an interesting idea, and I like the ideas behind it, I haven't played enough with it yet to dare use it in production (or on my main desktop for that matter) but it is certainly a tempting idea.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#3

Post by leetrout » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 10:54 AM UTC

I am very much looking forward to trying Nix I just haven’t made the time.

That being said the article jogged my memory on some related thoughts...

If you’re building deb packages for your own apt repo aptly is a great tool for powering it https://www.aptly.info/

If you haven’t tried asdf for managing versions of tools it generally does what you’d expect and does it well https://asdf-vm.com/#/ It uses pyenv under the hood for Python management AFAIK.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#4

Post by bennyp101 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #3

I am very much looking forward to trying Nix I just haven’t made the time. That being said the article jogged my memory on some related thoughts... If you’re building deb packages for your own apt repo aptly is a great tool for powering it https://www.aptly.info/ If you haven’t tried asdf for managing versions of tools it generally does what you’d expect and does it well https://asdf-vm.com/#/ It uses pyenv under the…

asdf is awesome and if you combine it with direnv you can just cd into your project and have the versions ready to go

(You can do the same with nix and direnv asdf - althrough I havent got that far yet)

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#5

Post by _xrjp » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:02 AM UTC

My first time seeing Nix, very promising https://nixos.org/#asciinema-demo-cover

Definitely Nix deserves a try.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#6

Post by domenkozar » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

I've written a few tutorials at https://nix.dev/, more to come in following months :)

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#7

Post by tarkin2 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

I tried to learn before. But the docs made it incredibly hard. They went into excruciating detail of how it works. I still never made my own nix package. I’m wondering as a solo dev, who uses his personal machine, and two servers, if the hard work of learning it will pay off. But it definitely looks interesting.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#8

Post by tazjin » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

There's a lot of unexplored potential of Nix in granular build systems and displacing systems like Bazel. If applied correctly, it lets smaller organisations get much of the benefit of Google-style monorepos but without as much maintenance overhead.

Some friends and I have been experimenting with this for the last year over at https://tvl.fyi (code etc. is linked at the page bottom).

We've run into some issues with the current implementation of Nix, but stay tuned on that :)

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#9

Post by supermatt » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

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 accessible, IMHO. I simply didnt have the patience to delve any deeper.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#10

Post by domenkozar » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

tarkin2 wrote: post #7

I tried to learn before. But the docs made it incredibly hard. They went into excruciating detail of how it works. I still never made my own nix package. I’m wondering as a solo dev, who uses his personal machine, and two servers, if the hard work of learning it will pay off. But it definitely looks interesting.

What kind of tutorial would you like to read?