nix.dev VS vulnix

Nix (https://nix.dev/) can provide all of this, although in a smarter way than just through dumping everything in the VCS. Some projects use it already to provide a reproducible development environment and if done right a clean build is just a `nix-build` away.

Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them.

https://nixos.org/explore

https://nix.dev/

if you want something a more in-depth, zero to nix is a great resource for all things nix (they have a section dedicated to flakes here, but i would pay attention to the notice at the top about reading some other things first), along with nix.dev, and of course, the nixos wiki article on flakes

On nix.dev it say I would need to cross compile to make it work, is there some way in which i can build natively on my machine.

Hey

Cachix founder here. Here are a few links for getting started:

- https://nix.dev Nix tutorials

- https://devenv.sh Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments

Let me know if you have any questions. Domen

Nix pills and nix.dev are my favorites, alongside the official documentation.

https://nix.dev/ is the best in depth resource I know but it's a work in progress.

For folks looking to understand why this is so https://nix.dev and https://devenv.sh/

it is very easy to scan your entire dependency tree for known vulnerabilities for Nix, all the way up to a whole OS

Initially I spent a lot of time as I used it as an opportunity to learn Nix/NixOS. I used Nix intentionally as it's a rolling release and also it's declarative and intended for reproducible deployments, so I don't need to deal with an OS like Ubuntu that slowly gets crufty and out of date and needs a clean-up or upgrade or complete re-install. And if I do need to re-install, it should be mostly a one-liner.

For security there are these scanners:

https://github.com/flyingcircusio/vulnix

https://github.com/andir/nix-vulnerability-scanner

I also run all services in docker and my network uses VLANs behind an OPNSense firewall. I use Wireguard as a pinch point into my network to access most services. So I'm not too worried about the security aspect.

Upgrading on Nix is pretty easy - just bump your lock file and it will get the latest packages, assuming you are on the unstable channel. But unstable does break on occasion. You an also use the latest stable release of Nix and selectively choose unstable packages, which is probably the way to go. I rarely need to fix anything - it's pretty stable. It only starts eating time when I want to add or upgrade some element to the system, but I always make sure to never do any action that isn't captured in Nix config and backed up, so that I don't have to come back and figure out what exactly I did or how something works again. It's been fine. Nix has a pretty steep learning curve, but considering its power, I think it's absolutely worth it.

Along with the results of the diff the comment also provides the results of running vulnix