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Yann Esposito (Yogsototh) 05314b7001
update for the new blog post.
2020-06-17 00:10:49 +02:00

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How I use nix

Have you ever written a small script and you update your system and this stop working? Have you copied your tool/script to another machine it doesn't work because some dependency is missing? Have you tried to sync your dotfiles to another env and there are a few details not working? Some missing dependency? If the answer is yes, then nix can help.

Scripts

Suppose you want to write a portable script. For example, the script I use to minify my CSS. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell --pure
#!nix-shell -i bash
#!nix-shell -I nixpkgs="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/19.09.tar.gz"
#!nix-shell -p bash minify

minify "$1" > "$2"

So let's analyze each line of the header block:

#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
basic, use nix-shell to run the script.
#!nix-shell --pure
only use dependencies installed in this nix shell environment. A bit as if the PATH environment variable was emptied.
#!nix-shell -i bash
tell nix-shell to run bash
#!nix-shell -I nixpkgs="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/19.09.tar.gz"
pin the nixpkgs using this archive.
#!nix-shell -p bash minify
install bash and minify in the nix shell.

Now if the script is run on a machine with nix installed you can be pretty sure it will work as expected. Even if I update my OS and I forget about this script for a few years. As long as I can install nix on the new system and I could download the tar file the script will be run the same way as the day I wrote it.

Remark: You can use any shell (like fish, zsh) but also other languages python, haskell, etc…

Temporary working env

Quite often, I need to do something, and run a specific command that need me to install a very specific command. And I'm pretty sure I will not use this tool ever again.

For those cases, what I do, is generally run my command directly with a fresh nix-shell.

> nix-shell -p httpie
[nix-shell:~]$ ... here I can use httpie ...

If I don't use httpie for a while it will be garbage collected eventually.

Home Manager

A few years ago I used brew to install the tools I need. With nix you can install a new tool with nix-env -i instead of brew install. Still recently I prefer to use home-manager.

The main advantage is that it is even more reproductible and can easily be shared accross different machines.

Mainly when I need a new binary I add it in a description list in the file ~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix. It looks like this:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  # emacs
  emacsMacport
  imagemagick
  gnupg
  # shell
  direnv
  ...
];

then I simply run home-manager switch and I've got all those tools in my env.

Pinning the packages 

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
  # ...
  pkgs = import (fetchGit {
    name = "nixpkgs20";
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs";
    # obtained via
    # git ls-remote https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs nixpkgs-20.03-darwin
    ref = "refs/heads/nixpkgs-20.03-darwin";
    rev = "58f884cd3d89f47672e649c6edfb2382d4afff6a";
  }) {};
  # ...
in {
  # ...
}

Specific tools

There are a few noticiable artifacts here:

The first one is weechat is a very specify build of weechat with the plugin I need. For that I created a new directory weechat-with-weeslack containing a default.nix:

{ pkgs, ...}:
pkgs.weechat.override {
  configure = { availablePlugins, ... }: {
    # plugins = with availablePlugins; [ python perl guile ];
    scripts = with pkgs.weechatScripts; [ wee-slack ];
  };
}

And in my home.nix I use:

  weechat-with-weeslack = import ./weechat-with-weeslack {
    inherit pkgs;
  };

Even if this looks cryptic. The important detail is just that there exists a way to say to nix I'd like to use weechat (an IRC client) with the wee-slack client (which uses python). And nix handle the rest for me without any conflict.

Another nice tool is sws

I use macOS so even though I'm using a darwin focused nixpkgs sometimes a few package can be broken and can't be installed.

That occurred with sws during the upgrade to 20.03 on darwin. This is a simple tool that need haskell to be compiled locally and installed. Here is how I could install it:

let
  ...
  rel19 = import (fetchGit {
    name = "nixpkgs19";
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs";
    ref = "refs/heads/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin";
    rev = "2f9bafaca90acd010cccd0e79e5f27aa7537957e";
  }) {};
  haskellDeps = ps: with ps; [
    base
    protolude
    tidal
    shake
    rel19.haskellPackages.sws
    ];
  ghc = pkgs.haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages haskellDeps;
  ...
in
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    ...
    ghc
    ...
  ]

So I used the older version from 19.09.

Dev environment

When working on a project. You can produce a pretty good local environment. For example, for my blog, I only use emacs and a few shell scripts. Still I needed to fix a few binaries, like the correct date via coreutils. And also I use html-xml-utils to easily deal with html/xml parsing. I use it to generate my RSS xml file.

So I have a shell.nix files at the root of my project:

{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/19.09.tar.gz) {} }:
  let my_aspell = pkgs.aspellWithDicts(p: with p; [en fr]);
  in
  pkgs.mkShell {
    buildInputs = [ pkgs.coreutils
                    pkgs.html-xml-utils
                    pkgs.zsh
                    pkgs.perl
                    pkgs.perlPackages.URI
                    pkgs.minify
                    pkgs.haskellPackages.sws
                    pkgs.cacert
                  ];
  }

So I just need to launch nix-shell and I have my environment.

A nice addition is to use direnv1 which support nix-shell by putting use_nix inside the .envrc at the root of the project. But by default invoking nix-shell can take a few seconds everytime. But we can do even better by using lorri2. I start the lorri daemon in my StartupItems mainly I simply created the file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.target.lorri.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.github.target.lorri</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/bin/zsh</string>
        <string>-i</string>
        <string>-c</string>
        <string>$HOME/.nix-profile/bin/lorri daemon</string>
    </array>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/var/tmp/lorri.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/tmp/lorri.log</string>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

And started the daemon with:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.target.lorri.plist

lorri takes care of keeping a cache and watch my configuration change by project. This makes the call to direnv almost instantaneous and seemless. I just changed the content of my .envrc with:

eval "$(lorri direnv)"

And of course this would work the same way with more complex shell.nix. Typically for Haskell projects.

Install

So you would like to use nix too?

First, let's start by the bad news. Recent macOS security policy made nix a bit harder to install on a mac. See macOS Installation instructions.

Once you have nix installed you should update the nix-channel. Mainly a nix-channels is where are the definitions of all the packages. See nixOS documentation.