dream2nix VS nix-portable

(I'm on the flox team) we'd love to support that and it's something we've talked about! We already support auto-generation for some languages like Rust because they have a lockfile (e.g. Cargo.lock), but it's a bit trickier for a requirements.txt. We hope at some point to contribute to/integrate with upstream efforts like dream2nix which have auto-generation as their goal

How about dream2nix? I like to use the nix way, but there are many third nix ways

I'm not 100% sure, but looking at the docs [here](https://nix-community.github.io/dream2nix/subsystems/node.html#granular-pure-default) and the implementation [here](https://github.com/nix-community/dream2nix/tree/main/src/subsystems/nodejs/builders/granular-nodejs) it seems as it builds dependencies separately and symlinks (see `install-deps.py` those into a `node_modules` tree. I don't know much about Yarn's PNP (was doing more backend/devex last few years), but it sounds vaguely similar in that each package should be built once as a separate derivation and then symlinked to a big `node_modules`-as-a-symlink-tree derivation?

How are you building your NodeJS project with Nix right now? Recently I spot a new abstraction, it looks good but I havn't tried it yet: https://github.com/nix-community/dream2nix

dream2nix is a great package, that makes a nix-derivation out of node project with the minimal flake

The DavHau/dream2nix project aims to be a generic solution for this issue by splitting the problem into specific stages, each of which can be configured individually (e.g., changing the level of purity)

There is also nix-portable (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), which is basically a drop-in replacement for normal nix that does everything required for no-root operation by itself when needed. Just put the single binary in your PATH and it's ready.

level (/nix/store/)

Yes, for cache hits to happen it has to be this way as far as I remember.

There is a project called nix-portable though that I've seen some HPC users report success with:

https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

Great work Graham and team, I'll be switching to it on OSX.

I wonder if you took a look at some of the modifications done by portable-nix (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), most important ones being:

a) Allowing user to choose the location of the nix folder (for example $HOME/.nix) by using bwrap or proot

you can install it and forget about it. yeah the major downside is that you need to disable selinux unless you use nix portable.

Yeah sadly nix-portable doesn't support macOS because of missing kernel features. They are also thinking about docker fallback though: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable/issues/23 🤔😋

There is this: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable but I agree we need an official solution

Not entirely true, there are many ways in which you can use a custom location and still take advantage of the binary cache. You can do it with chroot, file system namespaces, bind mounts and so on. There's also a nice user friendly tool that does exactly this [1].

[1]: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

This is cool! In a similar vein, it's worth mentioning nix-portable is a thing. Same idea of containerization except it avoids docker. https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable