bundlers VS nixery

- the caching works across branches, so for example merging a feature branch to master, if nothing changes the build on master will be very quick

I created something similar to nix-cache for gitlab, but I had to create a dedicated runner running NixOS.

If I could use NixOS for deployment, at that point I would just point the same binary cache to the machine and use the same derivation to build the app. Because the app was already build by CI, it would just download the compiled version. No need for artifactory or similar. In that scenario (you using poetry) you probably would just use poetry2nix to generate the application.

If the OS is not NixOS, but you still want to deploy via nix, then IMO this[2] looks interesting, basically it packages everything in self extracting archive. That you can extract and then run the app.

Other alternatives are these bundlers[3], which includes building toArx (works in a way similar to the previous one but pretends everything is in a single file), RPM, DEB, docker (you would have more control over it if you would use the code directly instead of a bundler though)

And the last option (probably the most obvious one) is that you can simply just use the tool to build the package. Since you're using poetry, then you can generate a wheel from it.

[1] https://github.com/takeda/nix-cde/blob/master/contrib/gitlab...

[2] https://github.com/Ninlives/relocatable.nix

[3] https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers/blob/master/flake.nix

We've seen the opposite. New package managers are built with a much better understanding of the problem space because of Nix and sometimes explicitly taking ideas and concepts. This results in those new systems being far more compatible and easily integrated with Nix itself. Consider the iteration towards better and better locking in python + Node. Consider Rust/Cargo.

There has also been sharing of ideas and collaboration between things us and bazel/buck/spack/etc. I think it is clear that we are all moving towards a similar end state, that often looks very much like Nix, or a re-invention of it.

For things like OCI, Nix predates it, but we should start to re-use the standard. The Tvix group is exploring this and I'd suspect our sandboxing will be OCI at some point. For outputs; we make it easy to convert a Nix package into an equivalent container. Things like flatpack,AppImage,Snap should also be easy for people to output (i'm trying to collect these "transformers"/"bundlers" here: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers).

Nix 3 has a dead simple, builtin CLI frontend for built packages: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/new-cli/ni...

It uses dockerTools: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers/blob/master/flake.nix

maybe a bundler can be added that uses OCI tools, thus providing such a wrapper and giving a nice CLI for it

The ones from https://nixery.dev/

You can build your own with https://nixery.dev/

I built a service for doing this ad-hoc via image names a few years ago and it enjoys some popularity with CI & debugging use-cases: https://nixery.dev/

name is eerily similar to `nixpkgs`, i.e. the monorepo that defines all packages and one of the underlying technologies here. i get the play on buildpacks, but still, as a nix user it makes me do a double take reading the name

this is neat though, and in political terms, the elevator pitch mentions nix itself as an implementation detail in passing. hopefully, if this catches on, it'll function as a non-threatening gateway drug to nix itself, when users inevitably go digging into the weeds

for anyone interested, prior art on the nix container front: https://nixery.dev

Wow, this is excellent! At a previous job, we had been using k8s + knative to spin up containers on demand, and likewise were unhappy with the delays. Spawner seems excellent.

One question: have you had to do any custom container builds on demand, and if so, have you had to deal with large containers (e.g. a Python base image with a few larger packages installed from PyPI)? We would run up against extremely long build image times using tools like kaniko, and caching would typically have only a limited benefit.

I was experimenting using Nix to maybe solve some of these problems, but never got far enough to run a speed test, and then left the job before finishing. But it seems to me some sort of algorithm like Nixery uses (https://nixery.dev) to generate cacheable layers with completely repeatable builds and nothing extraneous would help.

Maybe that's not a problem you had to solve, but if it is, I'd love your thoughts.

Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix\ (38 comments)