nix-npm-buildpackage VS node2nix

https://github.com/serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage .

The struggle began when I tried to set up nix build to build my webapp. The issue is that clojure have some dependencies and npm has other dependencies. First I managed to get all nom dependencies included by using npm-buildpackage. This seems to be working correctly. However when building the application with shadow-cljs it fails. My guess is that it fails when trying to get dependencies from my deps.edn file.

I’ve spent too much time trying to make mkYarnPackage from nixpkgs to work and finally found https://github.com/serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage, which at least for yarn pretty much worked out of the box for me.

I usually got by with the python stuff in nixpkgs. Other than that for applications I would probably recommend poetry2nix as mentioned. For the nodejs I would use https://github.com/serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage

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