NIX Introduction and exploration of its ecosystem

NIX Installation

• https://nixos.org/nix/download.html
• curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

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