/nix-intro

An introduction to nix package manager

Primary LanguageNix

NIX Introduction and exploration of its ecosystem

NIX Installation

Slide Presentation

  • nix build -f shell.nix
  • open ./result/index.md.html

Basic nix examples: the 'awesome' project

A simple shell script called awesome-version is used to demonstrate the multi-version capabilities of nix. More specifically, by commenting two lines in packages/overlay.nix one can change the used version of node and the jdk used by gradle.

  • nix build: builds all attributes in default.nix. That is two versions of 'awesome' and the presentation slides explaining all the steps in this repository in more detail. The results are symlinked in ./result*.
  • ./result/bin/awesome-version displays the node/gradle version of the current configuration.
  • (un)comment the marked lines in packages/overlay.nix, nix build, re-run ./result/bin/awesome-version, and observe the changed versions.

Reproducible build environment

  • nix-shell: creates an build environment with various programs provided through the /nix/store in a pinned version. which mkSlides gradle npm docker.
  • mkSlides slides.md builds the slides using reveal.js & pandoc

NIX/Docker example

Nix can be used to build docker images. However, a linux binary must be build, because we cannot execute an e.g. MacOS binary within the docker container. Therefore, this example must be run on a linux system, or a or a remote builder for system 'x86_64-linux' and 'kvm' capabilities must be configured (https://github.com/LnL7/nix-docker) (https://github.com/LnL7/nix-docker).

  • nix build -f docker.nix
  • nix-shell
  • docker load < ./result
  • docker run --rm awesome-docker

NixOps example

Note that this examples requires a linux system, or a remote builder for system 'x86_64-linux' and 'kvm' capabilities.

  • nix-shell # provides us with nixops
  • nixops create -d intro nixops/intro-network.nix
  • nixops deploy -d intro
  • WEBSERVERIP=$(nixops info -d intro --plain | awk '{print $5}')
  • open http://$WEBSERVERIP/index.md.html
  • nixops destroy -d intro
  • nixops delete -d intro