ryantm/nix-dhall

nix-dhall - Drive Nix with Dhall expressions

nix-dhall provides infrastructure to drive Nix using Dhall expressions. This repository provides the core primitives, namely:

• dhall/Nix/derivation.dhall provides a function to create Nix derivations.

• dhall/Nix/fetchurl.dhall provides a function to create Nix derivations that fetch a specified URL.

• nix/nix-dhall.nix provides a top-level expression that transforms nix-dhall Dhall expressions to Nix forms that can be used with nix-build, etc.

Usage

1. To use nix-dhall, write a Dhall expression of type Derivation.

2. Next, compile this Dhall expression into a Nix expression with dhall-to-nix:

   dhall-to-nix <<< './your-expression.dhall' > your-expression.nix
   

3. Build the resulting Nix file using nix-dhall.nix:

   nix-build -E 'import ./nix/nix-dhall.nix (import ./your-expression.nix)'