hydra VS poetry2nix

See https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/838 for making content-addressed derivations supported by hydra.nixos.org. At that point, we can actually try out the XP feature at scale.

Also see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8919 for this accepted RFC

Once those things are done, we can get back to merging in the IPFS code.

Now that there is an Nix team and I am on it, there is much, much less of an issue of these experiments being caught in limbo :).

https://github.com/nix-community/infra, Community project builds https://github.com/NixOS/hydra, NixOS build server

Nix is pretty cool, and I would say comparisons to Earthly are apt. I may tackle that in a follow-up. If you did a monorepo setup written in nix and then used something like Hydra for building, it might be a pretty nice solution.

Nix seems great for build servers. This is a great introduction to the motivations behind it.

I'm not sold on using it for managing developer environments (another use case it is often used for). It "solves" the problem that developers might be using different versions of libraries or compilers on their machines... but it comes at the cost of having to learn a whole new programming language, a configuration language, a whole new jargon, and workflow. It's a bit like using Docker as a development environment. It introduces a non-trivial amount of friction.

Some folks get excited about package management and configuration. Personally I don't care for it enough to over-come such a high learning curve. And I don't particularly like the workflow it enforces.

However it is pretty great for reproducible CI/CD systems like Hydra: https://github.com/NixOS/hydra

Somewhat related to this, is there a good way to install something from a flake inside the configuration.nix? For example, the hydra flake, since it includes many derivations for dependencies that are not part of nixpkgs (or are at the wrong versions).

How about converting it to Nix derivation?

https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix

This looks really strange because I do not know how to solve it and also because it looks like the sha256 that I am setting is not the one that Nix will match. I read also https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/issues/413 but I was not able to solve the problem.

There's a project that does this with using Nix: https://github.com/takeda/nix-cde (this is a wrapper around https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix)

{ description = "Application packaged using poetry2nix"; inputs.flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils"; inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"; inputs.poetry2nix = { url = "github:nix-community/poetry2nix"; inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs"; }; outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils, poetry2nix }: flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system: let # see https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/tree/master#api for more functions and examples. inherit (poetry2nix.legacyPackages.${system}) mkPoetryEnv; pkgs = import nixpkgs {inherit system;}; python = pkgs.python310; pythonEnv = mkPoetryEnv { inherit python; projectDir = ./.; preferWheels = true; }; in { #packages.default = mkPoetryEnv { # projectDir = ./.; # python = pkgs.python310; #}; devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [pythonEnv]; packages = [ poetry2nix.packages.${system}.poetry pkgs.cairo pkgs.pkg-config pkgs.gobject-introspection pkgs.tk ]; }; }); }

A cleaner way might be to use https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix which can load poetry.lock inside Nix. I still need to try it for torch, but it does seem like a clean way to use it.

The README for poetry2nix (https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix) seems to indicate that all extras should be enabled by default.

if it's for a project you're working on, i'd recommend just using poetry2nix

poetry2nix is another popular option.