napalm VS watchlog

I created https://github.com/nmattia/napalm/issues/34 and https://github.com/nmattia/naersk/issues/183 to move them to nix-community

Sure. NPM is the easy case because the package-lock.json file can easily be read by Nix and contains hashes for all of the packages. This means that simply be importing the file into Nix you can have a reproducible build. No Nix-specific maintenance required.

In the linked case I use this library to manage that https://github.com/nmattia/napalm (in that example I use master but for production I would pin a version). It simply parses the package-lock.json, downloads the packages and uses npm to build the node_modules folder. It also provides some convenient functions for building packages with "bin" files or just linking node_modules inside a build.

Note that this is more for project development. It doesn't use the "system" packages (intentionally) for Node, it fetches whatever versions you have specified from NPM. Nix will only provide the "native" stuff like Node and NPM themselves and any native libraries.

I found myself doing this as well and decided to write a simple tool to do it "automatically" for me.

You still can't use it with less, but at least it allows you to mark "segments" of the log without switching to that window and mashing enter.

https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog

In general it is very nice. A common method is you create a `default.nix` file in the project you are working on and use tools that manage the deps for you. For example:

Rust+Cargo: https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog/-/blob/22c877065f763b3d...

Node+NPM: https://gitlab.com/kevincox/kevincox-web-compiler/-/blob/9fa...

My only Ruby project is private but I just rolled my own with:

export "GEM_HOME=$out"