at-node-nix VS node2nix

Probably relevant to your interests : https://github.com/aameen-tulip/at-node-nix

I've been writing some library routines, builders, and fetchers over the last few months that you're welcome to take a look at to fill gaps in a few existing tools. It's a work in progress so read it with a grain of salt. I plan to release some of it soon as flakes and plugins for dream2nix. https://github.com/aameen-tulip/at-node-nix

You may find something like node2nix helpful (https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix). This converts your package.json into a Nix expression that can then be cached. You're right that it does require some setup and a bit of Nix knowledge but could yield significant benefits and take a good chunk out of that 20 minutes.

Another option might be to use pnpm instead of Yarn and cache your pnpm dependencies. pnpm actually works a bit like Nix in that it creates a pnpm-lock.yaml file with content-based hashes for the full package.json dependency tree. This enables it to quickly determine which parts of the dependency tree it needs to build and which are already available.

I got it from this github issue in the node2nix repo.

As Gerschtli commented, it may be possible to generate a Nix expression for @mozilla/readability using node2nix. Then get its node_modules path like this and set NODE_PATH to the value.

For node programs, you may be able to find the commands as just packages, or look at https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix for creating the nix equivalent of a node-modules