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nixception v0.1.1

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@github-actions github-actions released this 20 Jul 08:35
· 48 commits to main since this release
v0.1.1
b7f9c92

nixception 0.1.1

nixception is a tool that turns REAPI build-tool actions into Nix builds. This
patch release trims the published artifacts down to the nixception binary
only; the upstream nativelink binary is no longer redistributed.

What's nixception?

nixception turns ordinary build-tool actions into Nix builds, using the Nix
store as a content-addressed cache.

It's a server that speaks the Remote Execution API (REAPI) — the same
protocol used by Bazel,
recc, and other build tools to offload
work to a remote executor. Instead of running each action on a pool of remote
workers, nixception translates every action it receives — a single compiler
invocation, a Bazel rule — into a Nix derivation and realises it through the
recursive-nix daemon.

 build tool ──REAPI──▶  nixception  ──recursive-nix──▶  /nix/store
 (bazel, recc, …)                                       (content-addressed cache)

Because the Nix store is content-addressed, identical actions are built exactly
once and reused across runs, across projects, and across machines that share
the store. The result is a shared, reproducible, deduplicated cache at the
granularity of individual build actions — not just whole packages.

Point any REAPI-speaking build tool at a nixception endpoint and its
fine-grained actions become cacheable Nix builds, with no change to the build
tool itself.

Using it

  • Build the server from source with Nix (nix build), or run it from the
    released static Linux binary attached below.
  • The intended integration for Nix builds is a nixpkgs setup hook that
    starts the server before a derivation's configure phase and tears it down on
    exit. See the README for details.

Status

nixception is experimental. The server topology, the setup-hook contract,
and the derivation encoding are still evolving; interfaces may change between
releases.

Credits and licensing

nixception is built on top of
NativeLink by Trace Machina, Inc.
and the NativeLink authors, and derives from its last Apache-2.0 licensed
commit. All credit for the underlying build-cache and remote-execution
infrastructure belongs to them.

The nixception sources are licensed under Apache-2.0. Binary distributions
of the server are additionally governed by GPL-3.0 through the statically
linked nix-compat crate — see NOTICE for full attribution and
licensing details.

Full Changelog: v0.1.0...v0.1.1

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