nixception v0.2.1

nixception 0.2.1

nixception is a tool that turns REAPI build-tool actions into Nix builds. This
release makes a bare nixception binary self-sufficient — it now builds its
own runner through the recursive-nix daemon when the runner environment
variables aren't set, so it no longer refuses to start outside the setup hook.
Default logging is also much quieter (per-action and per-request chatter moved
to debug), and the server's log level is now configured with NIXCEPTION_LOG
instead of RUST_LOG.

0.2.1 fixes a build regression that prevented 0.2.0 from producing release
artifacts (the embedded runner sources were dropped by the flake source filter).
See the changelog for the full list.

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: v0.2.0...v0.2.1