crate2nix

crate2nix generates nix build files for rust crates using cargo.

Same dependency tree as cargo: It uses cargo_metadata to obtain the dependency tree from cargo. Therefore, it will use the exact same library versions as cargo and respect any locked down version in Cargo.lock.

Smart caching: It uses smart crate by crate caching so that nix rebuilds exactly the crates that need to be rebuilt. Compare that to docker layers...

Nix ecosystem goodness: You can use all things that make the nix/NixOS ecosystem great, e.g. distributed/remote builds, build minimal docker images, deploy your binary as a service to the the cloud with NixOps, ...

Out of the box support for libraries with non-rust dependencies: It builds on top of the buildRustCrate function from NixOS so that native dependencies of many rust libraries are already correctly fetched when needed. If your library with native dependencies is not yet supported, you can create an overlay to add the needed configuration to the defaultCrateOverrides.

Easy to understand nix template: The actual nix code is generated via templates/build.nix.tera so you can fix/improve the nix code without knowing rust if all the data is already there.

Here is a simple example which uses all the defaults and will generate a Cargo.nix file:

# From the project directory.
crate2nix generate

Here is a more elaborate example that uses <nixos-unstable> as the default nixpkgs path and specifies both the path to the Cargo.toml file (-f) and the output (-o) file explicitly.

crate2nix generate \
    -n '<nixos-unstable>' \
    -f /some/project/dir/Cargo.toml \
    -o /some/project/dir/crate2nix.nix

Use crate2nix help to show all commands and options.

Installation

NOTE: It is only tested on Linux for now!

If you are not running, install a recent version of nix by runnin curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh or following the instructions on https://nixos.org/nix/.

Then either

# Install the stable version to your user env (with shell completions):
nix-env -i -f https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix/tarball/0.5.1

# Start a shell with it (without shell completions):
nix-shell https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix/tarball/0.5.1

Development Version (master)

Similarly, you can either

# Install the stable version to your user env (with shell completions):
nix-env -i -f https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix/tarball/master

# Start a shell with it (without shell completions):
nix-shell https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix/tarball/master

If you want to tweak crate2nix, clone the repository and then

cd crate2nix
nix-shell
# you are in a shell with crate2nix

Nixpkgs Version

This uses a pinned version nixos-unstable because at the time of writing this, it contains a necessary fix.

If that doesn't work for you, you can override the pkgs argument, e.g.:

nix-shell --arg pkgs 'import <nixos> {config = {}; }'

Generating build files

The crate2nix generate command generates a nix file. You can specify the output file with -o. E.g.

crate2nix generate -o Cargo.nix

generates Cargo.nix from the Cargo.lock in the current directory.

Look at the ./Cargo.nix file of this project for a non-trivial example. (How meta!)

Using build files (single binaries)

If your Cargo.nix was generated for a single binary crate (i.e. workspace) then the derivation that builds your binary can be accessed via the rootCrate.binary attribute. Use this command to build it and make the result available in the result directory:

your_crate_name="super_duper"
nix build -f Cargo.nix rootCrate.binary
./result/bin/${your_crate_name}

Within a nix file (e.g. your manually written default.nix), you can access the derivation like this:

let cargo_nix = callPackage ./Cargo.nix {};
in cargo_nix.rootCrate.binary

Using build files (workspaces)

If your Cargo.nix was generated for a workspace (i.e. not a single binary) then the derivation that builds your binary CANNOT be accessed via the rootCrate attribute. There is no single root_crate.

Instead, you can conveniently access the derivations of all your workspace members through the workspaceMembers attribute. Use this command to build one of the workspace members and make the result available in the result directory:

your_crate_name="super_duper"
nix build -f Cargo.nix workspaceMembers.${your_crate_name}.binary
./result/bin/${your_crate_name}

Within a nix file (e.g. your manually written default.nix), you can access the derivation like this:

let cargo_nix = callPackage ./Cargo.nix {};
in cargo_nix.workspaceMembers."${your_crate_name}".binary

Dynamic feature resolution

The enabled features for a crate now are resolved at build time! That means you can easily override them:

There is a "rootFeatures" argument to the generated build file which you can override when calling it from the command line:
```
nix build -f ....nix --arg rootFeatures '["default" "other"]' rootCrate.build 
```

Or when importing the build file with "callPackage":

let cargo_nix = callPackage ./Cargo.nix { rootFeatures = ["default" "other"]; };
    crate2nix = cargo_nix.rootCrate.build;
in ...;

Or by overriding them on the rootCrate or workspaceMembers:

let cargo_nix = callPackage ./Cargo.nix {};
    crate2nix = cargo_nix.rootCrate.build.override { features = ["default" "other"]; };
in ...;

Known Restrictions

Before 0.4.x: Only default crate features are supported. It should be easy to support a different feature set at build generation time since we can simply pass this set to cargo metadata. Feature selection during build time is out of scope for now.
No support for building and running tests, see nixpkgs, issue 59177.
Renamed crates with an explicit package name don't work yet.
Since cargo exposes local paths in package IDs, the generated build file also contain them as part of an "opaque" ID. They are not interpreted as paths but maybe you do not want to expose local paths in there...
It does translates target strings to nix expressions. The support should be reasonable but probably not complete - please let me know if you hit problems. Before 0.2.x: Filters all dependencies for the hard-coded "Linux x86_64" target platform. Again, it should be quite easy to support more platforms. To do so completely and at build time (vs build generation time) might be more involved.
Git sources are now also supported. ~~Before 0.3.x: Only local sources and crates io supported. Again, just requires some work to resolve.~~
~~Before 0.2.x: No support for workspaces.~~

Feedback: What is needed for a 1.0 release?

I would really appreciate your thoughts. Please add comments to issue #8.

Runtime Dependencies

crate2nix use cargo metadata / nix-prefetch-url at runtime so they need to be in the PATH. The default.nix adds the built-time nix/cargo binaries as fallback to the path.

Currently, crate2nix is only tested with nixos-unstable (the future 19.03) since it depends on some new features and bug fixes.

Project Overview / Terminology

If you want to hack on this, it is useful to know that build file generation is broken up into multiple phases:

cargo metadata: Calling cargo metadata via the cargo_metadata crate.
indexing metadata: Indexing the metadata by package ID to enable easy joining of "Node" and "Package" information, resulting in metadata::IndexedMetadata.
resolving: Using the indexed metadata to actually resolve the dependencies and join all needed build information into resolve::CrateDerivation.
pre-fetching: Pre-fetching crates.io packages to determine their sha256, see prefetch module.
rendering: Rendering the data via the build.nix.tera template, see render module.

Related Projects

carnix is already widely used in NixOS itself, yet it failed to generate correct builds for my rust projects. After some attempts to fix that, I gave up. That said, big kudos for all the work on buildRustCrate and showing the way!
cargo-raze generates BUILD files for bazel.

Contributions

Contributions in the form of documentation and bug fixes are highly welcome. Please start a discussion with me before working on larger features.

I'd really appreciate tests for all new features. Please run cargo test before submitting a pull request.

Feature ideas are also welcome -- just know that this is a pure hobby side project and I will not allocate a lot of bandwidth to this. Therefore, important bug fixes are always prioritised.

By submitting a pull request, you agree to license your changes via all the current licenses of the project.

TMVector/crate2nix