cargo-chef VS nix

CI time. Do you want to micromanage your own docker images for all your CI? Great! If not, yes you do. In fact, you want to manage a docker image to build a docker image to use for CI. Use cargo-chef to prepare a build image with your dependencies pre-built if you want to do fine-grained build/test pipelines. Oh also, there's no jUnit test report generation, that was killed off today. (YES, SORRY, I'm still salty.)

Have you looked at cargo-chef? It supposedly speeds up compilation times if you're using Docker.

A tool already exists for this called Cargo-chef, and it works extremely well.

At work I've use Dockerfile and cargo-chef to improve build times. You can also look into buildkit cache mounts, but this approach is rarely super effective on hosted CI because they start from scratch on most runs. In the context of Rust specifically you may also see the target directory reflect unbounded data growth if it's reused over and over across revisions. because cargo by default won't expire older intermediate artifacts. Cargo-sweep can help with that but I wouldn't pursue this in a CI effort. This will affect both "native" builds and buildkit cache mounts if you're persisting the target directory.

We create an empty Rust binary with cargo new, this is a simple way to get Docker layer caching to work. For a more robust solution, you may want to check out cargo-chef.

If this ends up being a cleaner/easier way to having to workaround super expensive rebuilds for Rust given cache + deps compared to this https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cargo-chef , reading this thread will have been a huge win for me (and hopefully others).

Whether introducing Bazel is easier/worth it, subjective I guess.

I did a talk (slides here) about this a few years ago, it took a bit of work to get the build caching working with cargo. As others have pointed out, there is now cargo chef to solve this problem so you probably don't have to deal with the issues I saw, but I thought it still might be helpful context.

I'm curious if you've tried out cargo-chef, I've had some decent improvements with it but I wonder how it stacks up to the sccache approach (don't have the time to try it out myself right now).

for CI have you tried to use buildkit persistent runners with caching + https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cargo-chef ?

If you're deploying Rust with Docker I can tell you that cargo-chef is invaluable. With zero work it caches the dependency fetch and compilation steps. Most of the time the ens Docker deploy is closer to an incremental compile than full.

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity