Nix related stuff

I'm playing around with Nix and recently NixOS, here will be the public part of my configurations and other toy examples on my path towards learning Nix.

Disclaimer

WARNING: the code here is crap :) Follow it if you want to learn.

Installing Nix

Can be done as simple as:

curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Bootstrap multiuser:

curl https://nixos.org/nix/install -o install
sh ./install --daemon

Using Nix as a package manager

I found using Nix as a package manager is the best entry drug to the shiny NixOS world. It even works on MacOS.

Update channel:

nix-channel --update

Search and install package:

nix-enq -qaP | grep go
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.go

Update all packages:

nix-enq -u

Getting started

NixPills is a great resource to learn. As you can see this stuff is also inspired by Sam's blog post series too.

Motivation

Domen Kožar in his blog post can explain better than me why Nix is the way to go.

I've been using Puppet or as I call it the PHP of configuration management since version 2 :) It always becomes a tangled mess eventhough I've been trying to follow role/profile/module pattern. A strong functional language has a steep learning curve, but I believe in the long term the simple composability pays off.

TODO

Testing is currently done like in this suggestion https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/25264 and only with nix-instantiate, perhaps we need to change that?

Try nix-darwin and home-manager

CI

GitLab

target:
  image: nixos/nix
  variables:
    NIX_PATH: "nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-18.09.tar.gz"
  script:
    - nix-build ...

Travis

language: nix
env:
  - NIX_PATH="nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-18.09.tar.gz"