nix-buildkite

nix-buildkite is a tool that can take a Nix expression that describes a set of builds and transforms them into separate Buildkite jobs. nix-buildkite evaluates Nix to create derivations and then analyses these derivations to find a topological ordering that will ensure steps have the correct dependencies between them.

Getting Started

jobs.nix

First, create a jobs.nix file in your repository. This file will contain a tree of all builds that you are interested in. We create this tree using nested attrsets that eventually have leaves that are derivations.

For this example, we'll start by building the nix-buildkite project. Our jobs.nix file is:

let pkgs = import ./nix/pkgs {};
in
{
  nix-buildkite = pkgs.haskellPackages.nix-buildkite;
}

.buildkite/pipeline.yml

Next, add a .buildkite/pipeline.yml file with the following contents:

steps:
  - command: nix-buildkite
    label: ":nixos: :buildkite:"
    plugins:
      circuithub/nix-buildkite:
        file: jobs.nix

Add Your Pipeline

The final step is to add your pipeline to Buildkite. See https://buildkite.com/docs/pipelines/defining-steps#getting-started for details on how to do this. Once you have a pipeline created, make sure that the only step declared in the pipeline configuration in Buildkite's UI is:

steps:
  - command: buildkite-agent pipeline upload
    label: ":pipeline:"

Sit Back and Enjoy!

That's it! Following these steps should give you a working pipeline that builds nix-buildkite.