NixOS News

Framework Partnership Announcement

NixOS — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Official Partnership between NixOS Foundation and Framework

TL;DR: Since April 2025, The NixOS Foundation and Framework are officially partnering to improve NixOS support on Framework devices. This formalizes earlier community efforts, enabling selected community members to contribute to testing, documentation, and support for current and future hardware.

From Community Effort to Official Partnership

We're excited to announce that the collaboration between the NixOS Foundation and Framework is evolving: what started as a community-led initiative has become an official partnership.

This step also strengthens the relationship between Framework and the NixOS Foundation, with a shared focus on improving hardware support for NixOS on Framework devices both for existing and upcoming devices.

Why we decided to move from a community-led partnership to an official one

The collaboration between NixOS community members and Framework was a great starting point and showed what’s possible when passionate individuals come together. But naturally, such efforts are limited by the time and availability of just a few people. To build stronger, long-term relationships with hardware vendors and grow more industrial partnerships, we need to offer reliability and professional coordination. An official partnership gives manufacturers the confidence that the collaboration will continue beyond individual contributions, increasing the chances that NixOS could become an officially supported Linux distribution and allowing us to expand into new areas together.

What this means for the community

This partnership combines efforts to improve NixOS compatibility with Framework hardware in a more structured way. Selected community members and members of the hardware team can contribute to testing, documentation, and support, helping to enhance NixOS support on Framework devices and build a stronger partnership with Framework.

What we have achieved so far

We have created a shared Matrix channel between Framework and the NixOS Hardware Team for troubleshooting.
Framework (@JohnAZoidberg) is now contributing directly to the nixos-hardware and the nixpkgs repositories
- Framework 12
- Framework 16 AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series
- Framework Desktop
Framework donates €216/month
We received 2 Framework AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series devices.
The fw-fanctrl module was added to NixOS.
Framework donated Hardware to the NixOS Foundation for NixCon : Framework Desktop Max+ 395 , which was well received by our Guests.
Screen-rotation on Framework 12 merged: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/427476

NixOS 25.11 released

NixOS — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are jopejoe1 and Leona Maroni, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.11 "Xantusia".

NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2026-06-30). The old release 25.05 "Warbler" is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2025-12-31.

The 25.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2742 contributors, who authored 59430 commits since the previous release.

Highlights

Our vast and routinely maintained set of packages has also been updated. This release of Nixpkgs

Added 7002 new packages
Updated 25252 existing packages
Removed 6338 outdated packages, in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.

In addition to packages from Nixpkgs, the NixOS Linux distribution also features composable configuration modules and integration tests for distributed systems. This release of NixOS

Added 107 new modules and 1778 configuration options
Removed 41 outdated modules and 807 configuration options.

GNOME 49

GNOME has been updated to version 49 "Brescia", which removes X11 session support, introduces a new video player, a new document viewer, a redesigned calendar and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

C compilers

LLVM has been updated to version 21. GCC remains at version 14. CMake was updated to version 4.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank

Seth and dish for editorializing the release notes
Yohann Boniface for the release logo
The NixOS infrastructure team for their dutifully tending to our build infrastructure
The Nixpkgs staging team for supporting our staging cycles and the patient fixing of many build errors.

We also want to thank all contributors who made this release possible!

Reflections and closing

We are grateful for the opportunity to support the community as release managers and to learn about and participate in the release process. Seeing all the contributors working in their area of the project to improve it has been an exciting experience. We would like to thank everyone in the community for that. We are looking forward to the next release, NixOS 26.05 "Yarara".

NixOS 25.05 released

NixOS — Fri, 23 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are Leona Maroni and Tristan Ross, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.05 "Warbler".

NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2025-12-31). The old release 24.11 "Vicuña" is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life and stop receiving security updates after 2025-06-30.

The 25.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2857 contributors, who authored 57054 commits since the previous release.

Highlights

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release of Nixpkgs

Added 7840 new packages
Updated 28054 existing packages
Removed 1694 outdated packages, in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.

In addition to packages from Nixpkgs, the NixOS Linux distribution also features composable configuration modules and integration tests for distributed systems. This release of NixOS

Added 137 new modules and 1930 configuration options
Removed 10 outdated modules and 215 configuration options.

GNOME 48

GNOME has been updated to version 48 "Bengaluru", which introduces notification stacking, a new music player, HDR support, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Kernel

The default Linux kernel has been updated from 6.6 to 6.12. All supported kernels remain available.

C compilers

LLVM has been updated to version 19. GCC has been updated to version 14.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank

Seth and raf for editorializing the release notes
Yohann Boniface for the release logo
The NixOS infrastructure team for their dutifully tending to our build infrastructure
The Nixpkgs staging team for supporting our staging cycles and the patient fixing of many build errors.

We also want to thank all contributors who made this release possible!

Reflections and closing

NixOS Logo and Branding Update

NixOS — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:00:00 GMT

History

The NixOS logo was originally designed by Simon Frankau for Haskell as part of the 2009 Haskell logo contest. Simon kindly gave permission for the design to be used by the NixOS project, and it was made official in November 2009. In 2015, a new version of the logo with a "hexagon design" was created by Tim Cuthbertson and added to the homepage. In March of 2017, it officially superseded the previous logo and was added to the nixos-artwork repository. Over the years, there have been many updates to the logo and repository, including:

Converting the logotype to paths, removing the dependency on users having the designated font installed.
Adding documentation about the font used to create the logotype, guide layers, and colors
Introducing various logo variants, including a vertical variant, an all-white variant, and a rainbow variant

Motivation to change

An incredible amount of work has gone into creating and improving the logo and its documentation. However, it suffers from some inconsistencies and many parts of it are still ambiguous.

The image below is a zoomed in view of the bottom of the NixOS logo with a horizontal line drawn starting at the bottom left of the snowflake. If you open the image and zoom in, you will see that the edges of the snowflake are not parallel to the horizontal line. Additionally, the edges of the snowflake are not collinear with each other. <img src="/images/blog/announcements/nixos-lambdas-not-collinear.jpg" alt="A zoomed in view of the bottom of the NixOS logo showing that the lambdas are not collinear or flat." style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; float: none; max-width: 100%; height: auto;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" />

The image below shows the paths that define the gradient for the lambdas. There are two gradient definitions that are different and ideally they would be the same.

When creating a brand guide, there are usually sections describing the anatomy of the logo, clearspace, sizing, alignment, variations, and misuse. Some of this information has been captured in the README co-located with the logos but not all of it is well defined. For example:

The anatomy of the logo is not well defined which should include information like the relative size of the logomark and logotype and the spacing between them.
The anatomy of the logomark is not well defined which should include information like the dimensions of the lambdas and the gap between lambdas.
The anatomy of the logotype is not well defined which should include information like spacing between glyphs.
The paths used to define the gradients of the lambdas are not well defined and are different.
The clearspace around the logo and logomark is not well defined.
The clearspace around the logo and logomark is not sufficient.
There are no guidelines about sizing and alignment.
There is no variation of the logotype by itself.
There are no guidelines about creating new variations.
There are no guidelines about misuse.

Work towards improvement

To address these issues, I want to improve how we create logos, create a Branding Guide, and create a Media Kit. Before I started any design work, I tried to find a tool that would satisfy my 2 requirements:

I have to be able to design the logo parametrically.
I have to be able to generate SVG files programmatically.

The idea behind the first requirement was that I want to be able to reduce the creation of the logo to a few simple parameters. Additionally, if I can generate the SVG files programmatically, I can programmatically generate the Branding Guide and Media Kit. I'm calling this approach "Branding as Code" (BaC)

I surveyed many FOSS image editing and CAD tools but none of them could satisfy both my requirements. In the end, I decided to create my own tooling in Python. After three months of work the tooling has a lot of capabilities. It can:

Generate a lambda based on 3 parameters: radius, thickness, and gap.
Generate a logomark with different colors and color styles.
Generate a logotype with different colors and styles.
Generate a logo (logomark + logotype) in different layouts.
Generate all three logo products with different clearspace values and meaningfully unique filenames.
Generate dimensioned and annotated SVG files for use in the Branding Guide.

A few example output products are shown below.

All of these efforts - and the ones still underway - are being done to serve the community, which truly deserves to be treated as a mature and important organization. In today’s world, a clear visual identity and coherent narrative are must-haves for any serious project. Meeting the requirements of modern communication and marketing practices isn't about following trends for their own sake; it’s about giving NixOS the tools it needs to thrive and be recognized alongside other respected projects.

We’re taking the steps that are expected - and needed - to ensure the health and growth of the project. Many other communities that invested early in structured branding benefit from easier outreach, clearer communication, and a stronger sense of belonging. On the other hand, projects that neglected this aspect have often faced issues with fragmentation, public confusion, and difficulty attracting new users and contributors. We're choosing the path that sets NixOS up for long-term success, while staying true to the spirit of openness and excellence that defines this community.

There is still much more work to be done including: generating many more annotated drawings for the Branding Guide, creating the Branding Guide, and creating the Media Kit. I would like to thank Ida Bzo, Sebastian Kraus, Ross Turk, and David Nuon for their feedback and assistance throughout this process. This is just the beginning of building a more precise, flexible, and scalable visual identity for the NixOS project.

Daniel Baker
Brand and Design Steward

The NixOS Foundation Board Announced

NixOS — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:00:00 GMT

A New Chapter for the NixOS Foundation

On March 4th, 2025, we welcomed a new NixOS Foundation Board — marking the first-ever board rotation under our newly established constitution. Change is always a big step, but we believe this one is for the better! With clearly defined roles and a more structured approach, the Foundation is set up for success in supporting the Nix & NixOS ecosystem.

Following a thorough selection process, carefully coordinated with the Steering Committee, the new board members are:

President/Chair: Ron Efroni Rotman (continuing role) (@ron)
Secretary: Silvan Mosberger (@infinisil)
Director of Legal Affairs: Ryan Trinkle (@ryantrinkle)
Treasurer: Maximilian Habryka (@lassulus)
Director of Community Support: Sebastian Kraus (@ra33it0)

This team is at the heart of the Foundation’s mission — to strengthen and support the Nix & NixOS community.

A Huge Thank You

To everyone who participated — whether by nominating, giving feedback, or simply showing support—your engagement made this possible. Seeing so many community members step up to contribute has been truly inspiring!

What’s Next?

Legal Handover – The transition process with the KVK in Utrecht is underway.
Onboarding & Operations – In the coming weeks and months, we’ll focus on getting the new board fully onboarded and operational.

Looking forward to an exciting future — together!

NixOS 24.11 released

NixOS — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Hello everyone, we are Tristan Ross and Weijia Wang, the release managers for the newest release of NixOS known as NixOS 24.11 Vicuña. We're glad to announce that after the additional week-long delay that we can deliver this stable release of NixOS.

NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2025-06-31).

The 24.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2669 contributors, who authored 49079 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 8141 new packages and 20975 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 3970 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 119 new modules and removed 30. In that process we added 1706 options and removed 556.

GNOME 47

GNOME has been updated to version 47 "Denver", which introduces accent colors, small screen support, screen capture hardware encoding, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Plasma 6

Plasma has been updated to version 6.2, which introduces many bug fixed and other changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Darwin Rework

Emily, Randy Eckenrode, and toonn did an amazing job with their work as the Darwin core maintainers to bring better support for Darwin into Nixpkgs. A comprehensive list of changes can be found on the NixOS Discourse under "The Darwin SDKs have been updated".

C Compilers

LLVM has been updated to version 19 and GCC remains the same version. Tristan Ross made many changes which improves the way we provide multiple versions of LLVM.

Special thanks

We want to personally thank seth and Priyanshu Tripathi for editorializing the release notes, lennart for doing the release logo, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets and staging cycles, Martin Weinelt for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure, and Cole Helbling for his effort on keeping ofBorg running.

Reflections and Closing

We are thankful for everyone who contributed and everyone who was patient for 24.11. It has been a great time working with everyone to make this release possible. We hope everyone is looking forward to the next release, NixOS 25.05 Warbler.

Result for the Nix Steering Committee Election 2024

NixOS — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

After successfully using CIVS to tally the 450 ballots cast (56% turnout) on OpaVote, We are hereby concluding this election! We congratulate the first members of the Nix Steering Committee (SC) (ordered alphabetically):

@Ericson2314 (2 year term)
@fpletz (1 year term)
@Gabriella439 (2 year term)
@jtojnar (2 year term)
@roberth (2 year term)
@tomberek (1 year term)
@winterqt (1 year term)

This result is certified by all Election Committee members.

For verification purposes, all OpaVote ballots will soon be available here (the result there should be ignored; voters will also get an email), while the CIVS tally to determine the result using the same ballots is already available here. See the new docs for more info on result verification.

We are now establishing communications with the first SC members and will soon make a final handover announcement on behalf of the EC / NCA.

We, the members of the EC / NCA, and Ron from the NixOS Foundation board, are thankful for everybody's participation in this first election, and are looking forward to see the first SC getting started.

Note that you can also read and publicly discuss this announcement on Discourse.

Nix Steering Committee Election 2024

NixOS — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Some links in this post are only accessible to NixOS org members.

As a first step towards a better governance for official Nix projects, we are happy to announce the kick-off of the first Nix Steering Committee election!

The Steering Committee will be the primary community leadership body, responsible for steering the official Nix projects -- organisationally, socially, and technically. This includes making decisions over what is official, managing teams, approving NixOS Foundation policies relevant for the community, being the final escalation point, and more as detailed in the Nix Governance Constitution.

While the Steering Committee is given the authority to make decisions within the scope of its responsibilities directly, it is expected to delegate as much as possible.

Note that you can also read and publicly discuss this announcement on Discourse.

Participating

Automatically eligible voters will be sent an email and be added/invited to the @NixOS/voters-2024 GitHub team. If you're on the GitHub team but have not received an email, make sure to check and optionally update your email address.

If you're neither on the GitHub team nor have received an email, you're likely not automatically eligible. In this case you may consider requesting an exception.

Members of the GitHub team can:

Nominate themselves or others.
Endorse unconfirmed nominees that they'd like to be able to vote for.
Ask questions to nominees as the primary way of engaging with them.

If you have any questions or need support, please get in touch with the Election Committee.

Timeline

2024-09-29 Sun: Deadline for nominations
2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for endorsements
2024-10-03 Thu: Deadline for candidate questions
2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for candidate answers, submitting voter exceptions and updating voter email addresses
2024-10-07 Mon: Voting starts
2024-10-20 Sun: Voting ends
2024-10-23 Wed: Results announced

The results are expected to be announced just before NixCon 2024 in Berlin, which starts on 2024-10-25.

Open Letter to the European Commission

NixOS — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Initially published by petites singularités. English translation provided by OW2.

If you want to sign the letter, please re-publish the original letter on your website and add to the list of signatories.

Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.

NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:

"Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe" ; "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life" ;
"A structured ecosystem of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons".

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.

NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.

Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as "widening countries" [^1], currently both a success and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages implementing projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.

While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can't afford this renunciation. Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration.

This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.

In this perpective, we urge you to claim for preserving the NGI programme as part of the 2025 funding programme.

[^1]: As defined by Horizon Europe, widening Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lituania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Widening associated countries (under condition of an association agreement) include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Feroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldavia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine. Widening overseas regions are : Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique, Reunion Island, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, The Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands.

NixCon 2024 announced

NixOS — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2024, will take place October 25-27 2024 in Berlin For more information, see the NixCon 2024 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

Follow the discussion on discourse: NixCon Announcement, CFP Announcement

NixOS 24.05 released

NixOS — Fri, 31 May 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are Weijia Wang and Jörg Thalheim, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 24.05 “Uakari”.

NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2024-12-31).

The 24.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2491 contributors, who authored 47795 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 17777 new packages and 16249 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 9393 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 145 new modules and removed 23. In that process we added 1983 options and removed 304.

GNOME 46

GNOME has been updated to version 46 "Kathmandu", which introduces experimental VRR support, WebDAV support in Online Accounts, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Plasma 6

Plasma has been updated to version 6.0, which introduces new defaults, refreshed Breeze, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Linux Kernel 6.6

The default kernel package has been updated from 6.1 to 6.6. All supported kernels since 4.19 remain available.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Jacek Generowicz for editorializing the release notes, Lennart Mühlenmeier for doing the release logo, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets and staging cycles, Martin Weinelt for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure, and Cole Helbling for his effort on keeping ofBorg running.

Reflections and Closing

We are very thankful for this opportunity to learn about and participate in the release process. It has been an awesome experience to work with everyone on this release, and we want to say thank you to everyone in this community that built NixOS and helped made this release better.

NixOS 23.11 released

NixOS — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are figsoda and Ryan Lahfa, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.11 “Tapir”.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2024-06-30).

The 23.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2162 contributors, who authored 40024 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9147 new packages and 18700 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 4015 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 113 new modules and removed 18. In that process we added 1565 options and removed 362.

GNOME 45

GNOME has been updated to version 45 "Rīga", which introduces a new image viewer, a new camera app, and more changes. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Default LLVM Version

The default version for the LLVM package set has been updated to 16 (from 11) on both Linux and Darwin, which introduced lots of new features and improvements. The full lists of changes are available here (LLVM) and here (Clang).

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Alejandro Sánchez Medina and Lennart Mühlenmeier for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets, staging cycles and build infrastructure, Cole Helbling for his epic effort in bisecting kernel issues with ARM64 for our remote builders, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.

Reflections and Closing

I am very thankful for this opportunity to learn about and participate in the release process. It has been an awesome experience to work with everyone on this release, and I want to say thank you to everyone in this community that built NixOS and helped made this release better.

NixOS 23.05 released

NixOS — Wed, 31 May 2023 11:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are Ryan Lahfa and Martin Weinelt, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.05 “Stoat”.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-12-31).

The 23.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 1867 contributors, who authored 36566 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 16240 new packages and 13524 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 13466 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 282 new modules and removed 183. In that process we added 2882 options and removed 728.

Removal of weak hashing algorithms

The support for weak password hashing algorithms through the crypt(3) API was disabled in NixOS 23.05. We consider password hashing methods weak if the libxcrypt project did not flag them strong. This change affects user accounts on the local system, as well as the supported algorithms in many applications that rely on that API. Examples are authentication services like OpenLDAP or PAM, databases like PostgreSQL and, more generally speaking, programming languages that offer a password hashing interface like Python. These applications should be migrated away from weak password hashes before upgrading to NixOS 23.05, as the lack of support for these algorithms may make authentication for these applications impossible. If your system has user accounts that rely on such weak hashing algorithms, a warning will be emitted during activation. Existing users accounts are most likely using sha512crypt, for which the hash is prefixed with $6$. These will continue to work for the foreseeable future, but migrating to more modern hashes is strongly recommended anyway. Interactively configured passwords can be updated using passwd, new password hashes can be generated through mkpasswd. Note, that we do offer libxcrypt-legacy as an escape hatch, that affected packages can be overridden with.

Bootspec (RFC-125)

As part of standardization efforts in RFC 125, also called "Bootspec", all new users have a boot.json file in their system top-level derivation, you can check the one on the system you are running in /run/current-system/boot.json for example. The idea behind Bootspec is to enable new boot usecases in NixOS: UEFI Secure Boot, unifying bootloader installer scripts, multiple initrds or systemd system extensions and A/B schemas.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Lennart Mühlenmeier and Winter for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets, staging cycles and build infrastructure, Cole Helbling for his epic effort in bisecting kernel issues with ARM64 for our remote builders, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.

Reflections and Closing

I am very grateful for being given the opportunity to learn about the release process and run it with the help of everyone in the NixOS community. It has been a very exciting ride and witnessing the efforts of everyone poured in the project made me want to work towards supporting those efforts in many areas of the project, e.g. CI, infrastructure and more. Now that the process documentation has reached, in my experience, a high level of maturity. I believe it is now time for tooling to become consolidated, professional, comfortable and helpful for release managers and editors but also to all the persons close to the release process. As a previous release manager said it, the release process shall become only more boring in the future!

Tales from Nixpkgs - PR

NixOS — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 23:00:00 GMT

This is the first in a new series of posts called "Tales from Nixpkgs" where we examine Nixpkgs commits to understand how this ecosystem works and provide a bit of visibility into the process. This also gives us a chance to show appreciation for the maintainers and perhaps also uncover interesting stories along the way.

Let's take a look at a randomly picked commit from the last year of Nixpkgs:

git log --pretty=oneline --since 1y | shuf | head -n1 | cut -f1 -d' ' | xargs git show
commit 785bafc33818503172c7eecb60af711d794195b3
Merge: e7d00dfbd39 1e69e5c4280
Author: Fabian Affolter <mail@fabian-affolter.ch>
Date:   Fri Mar 3 15:05:51 2023 +0100

    Merge pull request #219037 from fabaff/openai-bump

    python310Packages.openai: 0.26.5 -> 0.27.0

The original PR for this is #219037. The motivation is to update the version of the openai Python package. It looks like along the way there is also a related update to shell-genie and some improvements to the metadata in Nixpkgs. A simple version bump is usually simpler, but this example is good because it will help us explain a few things along the way.

The entails taking a look at the build recipe and updating a few things:

git diff 785bafc33818503172c7eecb60af711d794195b3~1 785bafc33818503172c7eecb60af711d794195b3
pkgs/development/python-modules/openai/default.nix
diff --git a/pkgs/development/python-modules/openai/default.nix b/pkgs/development/python-modules/openai/default.nix
index ede1a7a3d84..92f2e327eb3 100644
--- a/pkgs/development/python-modules/openai/default.nix
+++ b/pkgs/development/python-modules/openai/default.nix
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@

 buildPythonPackage rec {
   pname = "openai";
-  version = "0.26.5";
+  version = "0.27.0";
   format = "setuptools";

   disabled = pythonOlder "3.7.1";
@@ -31,8 +31,8 @@ buildPythonPackage rec {
   src = fetchFromGitHub {
     owner = "openai";
     repo = "openai-python";
-    rev = "v${version}";
-    hash = "sha256-eKU+WRFf7f1yH63vcoQ9dVeqhJXBqMJGpk/9AoEgR0M=";
+    rev = "refs/tags/v${version}";
+    hash = "sha256-pXttGvnApYuwkWU7kCDNjw0rjHD5AyUvujfvpDVjgxM=";
   };

   propagatedBuildInputs = \[
@@ -91,6 +91,7 @@ buildPythonPackage rec {
   meta = with lib; {
     description = "Python client library for the OpenAI API";
     homepage = "https://github.com/openai/openai-python";
+    changelog = "https://github.com/openai/openai-python/releases/tag/v${version}";
     license = licenses.mit;
     maintainers = with maintainers; \[ malo \];
   };

First off, we see a bump in version from 0.26.5 to 0.27.0. Next we see the source is also updated with its hash providing an integrity check. (Note: these two steps are often performed by automation, stay tuned for future episodes). Lastly we see an improvement to the metadata pointing at a consistent location for the changelog of the OpenAI project.

Next we see changes to shell-genie. This is an application that uses openai to provide helpful command-line suggestions and it uses openai as a dependency.

git diff 785bafc33818503172c7eecb60af711d794195b3~1 785bafc33818503172c7eecb60af711d794195b3
pkgs/applications/misc/shell-genie/default.nix
diff --git a/pkgs/applications/misc/shell-genie/default.nix b/pkgs/applications/misc/shell-genie/default.nix
index 1429aabcd80..7225eb4c3fc 100644
--- a/pkgs/applications/misc/shell-genie/default.nix
+++ b/pkgs/applications/misc/shell-genie/default.nix
@@ -8,18 +8,16 @@ with python3.pkgs;

 buildPythonPackage rec {
   pname = "shell-genie";
-  version = "unstable-2023-01-27";
+  version = "0.2.6";
   format = "pyproject";

-  src = fetchFromGitHub {
-    owner = "dylanjcastillo";
-    repo = pname;
-    rev = "d6da42a4426e6058a0b5ae07837d8c003cd1239e";
-    hash = "sha256-MGhQaTcl3KjAJXorOmMRec07LxH02T81rNbV2mYEpRA=";
+  src = fetchPypi {
+    pname = "shell\_genie";
+    inherit version;
+    hash = "sha256-MgQFHsBXrihfWBB/cz45ITf8oJG2gSenf1wzdbrAbjw=";
   };

   nativeBuildInputs = \[
-    poetry
     poetry-core
   \];

@@ -35,9 +33,14 @@ buildPythonPackage rec {
   # No tests available
   doCheck = false;

+  pythonImportsCheck = \[
+    "shell\_genie"
+  \];
+
   meta = with lib; {
     description = "Describe your shell commands in natural language";
     homepage = "https://github.com/dylanjcastillo/shell-genie";
+    # https://github.com/dylanjcastillo/shell-genie/issues/3
     license = licenses.unfree;
     maintainers = with maintainers; \[ onny \];
   };

We see a set of very similar changes, a version bump, update and improvement to how we fetch the sources, additional checks performed, as well as an identification of an issue - there is no declared license for the shell-genie project. This brings us to an important part of the work of packaging. It is not only the technical work to shepherd updates along and fix bugs, but to communicate and coordinate across the open source world. @fabaff submitted an issue to the upstream project which resulted in this addition.

It is through many small changes and fixes like this that the overall ecosystem improves and these improvements have benefits not just for the Nix ecosystem, but outside of it as well. A common theme we will see in these tales is that our very strict approach to packaging has trickle-down benefits for upstream projects and other package managers.

So we have a fairly simple update, but also improvements to metadata and collaboration with other communities. Next in the PR we see some testing of the new recipe across various architectures and an approval from @malob. With the approval and all checks and tests in the green, the PR was merged. Sounds like success!

Thank you @fabaff for your contribution!

NixOS 22.11 released

NixOS — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 11:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we are Martin Weinelt and Janne Heß, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”.

This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-06-30).

The 22.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 1652 contributors, who authored 30371 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable distribution.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 16678 new packages and 14680 updated packages in nixpkgs. We also removed 2812 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure. In addition to packages the NixOS distribution also features modules and tests that make it what it is. This release brought 91 new modules and removed 20. In that process we added 1322 options and removed 487.

Password hashing migration

During the NixOS 22.11 lifecycle old password hashes may need to be updated, because we plan to disable weak password hashes in NixOS 23.05. We consider password hashing methods weak, if the libxcrypt project did not flag them strong. If your system is configured with weak hashes a script will emit a warning during activation. We expect most users accounts to be set up with sha512crypt (hash prefixed with $6$) which we will continue to support. Interactively configured passwords can be updated using passwd, new password hashes can be generated through mkpasswd.

aarch64-linux channel merge

The separate aarch64-linux specific channels have been discontinued. Their jobs have been merged into the generic nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small channels and will thereby receive updates at the same time as their x86_64-linux counterparts.

Special Thanks

We want to personally thank Winter and Jörg Thalheim for editorializing the release notes, Vladimír Čunát for his tireless effort in managing jobsets and staging cycles, and Graham Christensen for dutifully tending to our build infrastructure.

Reflections and Closing

I'm thankful for being given the chance to guide the release process. It is an exciting experience and seeing the tremendous collaborative effort the community invests to make the release a success is inspiring. While previous release managers made great strides to document the process there are lots of steps that could be benefit from better documentation and more tooling. It is our hope that future release managers and the community will iterate further on this.

The Rise of Special Project "infra"

NixOS — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

72 hours out. A bead of sweat slides from your brow, falls to the marred chassis of your local build server, and sizzles into mist, leaving a scant salt stain to tell the tale. It’s the start of the hottest Summer of Nix on record, and you have three days to research, provision, configure, and deploy. With or without you, this lecture is going live.

The deadline was 19 July, 2022; at five o’clock on that glistening Tuesday afternoon, one Eelco Dolstra – a living legend to those who understand – would take to the webcam from the verdant city of Utrecht to deliver a highly anticipated slice of fresh perspective on his now-19-year-old brainchild, Nix. It was the inaugural event in the premier Summer of Nix (SoN) Public Lecture Series. The hype was real, but so was our predicament: no self-hosted livestreaming infrastructure was yet in place.

Would we simply fall back on the usual gatekeeper platforms, surrendering control of the narrative and feeding our own to corporate leviathans in a vacuum of moral agency?

The ubiquity of these platforms suggests that most would.[^ubiquity] This, however, is SoN, and we aren’t most. Defying norms of defeatism and manufactured consent, we dare to declare a world of configurability. We celebrate that self-hosting empowers us to maintain ownership of both our content and its presentation, allowing us to introduce to our audience – our community – a way to engage with said content free from third-party influence.

Note that our solidarity is no coincidence; SoN begins with a contractual agreement between each participant and Eelco himself to uphold both NGI Zero’s aim to contribute to an open internet and the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, which emphasizes among other points the importance of respecting privacy.

Needless to say, the prospect of streaming Eelco’s lecture exclusively to closed-source, centralized, and infamously privacy-disrespecting services was an irony too plain to ignore. Fortunately, infrastructural improvement is a fundamental objective of the program, and Nix is the definitive tool for the job. In short, the Public Lecture Series livestreaming infrastructure was a natural first target. Time was not on our side, but good people were:

The NixOS Foundation was at the ready for server provisioning and DNS management.
Personnel at Tweag generously offered expertise in configuration and deployment in a pinch.
A new SoN Special Project – tidily dubbed infra – was launched to formalize the effort and attract participation.

With this kind of support, the odds were decidedly stacked in our favor, but could we deliver? We’d find out soon enough...

Phase I: Research

Everybody needs a saga. Ours was: self-host a secure livestreaming server to accommodate a sizable audience participating from all around the world and at variable network speeds, fast. Oh, and add a chat room for synchronous Q&A.

On the server side, we settled on the following stack: virtual private server (VPS) → NixOS → Caddy → Owncast.

The media would originate on our intrepid moderator’s local OBS Studio and be streamed at archival quality over the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to our remote Owncast service. Owncast would transcode the video to multiple stream qualities (i.e., optimized variants of video bitrate and CPU usage) and present the selected variant to the user in an attractive, branded web UI with a convenient chat box.

Phase II: Provision

Controlling the narrative has always called for a bit of hardware. For this exercise, we went with a single VPS equipped with dedicated vCPUs. The general provisioning procedure follows:

Choose a (preferably reputable and carbon negative) VPS provider.
Provision an instance appropriate to the task and estimated audience.
- To minimize latency, select the available region that best approximates the location of the source stream as well as the mean location of the majority of expected participants where applicable. Note that object storage and CDN caching additionally may be leveraged to accommodate participants; object storage enables the streaming service to serve media files when the concurrent user count exceeds available bandwidth, and CDN caching enables users to download these assets from the nearest available server.
- Select a server with enough (preferably dedicated) vCPU cores to handle video transcoding, which is a highly processor-intensive operation. Note that this should correspond to the stream variants selected in the streaming service configuration.
The instance we provisioned for the first stress test included the following specs:

vCPU RAM Local storage Location

8 32 GB 240 GB Germany
Reserve a public IPv4 address and IPv6 subnet and associate with the provisioned instance.
Assuming registration of the desired domain name, use a/the DNS registrar-provided interface to update the (or create an) A record for the target subdomain (live.nixos.org in our case) with the IP address associated with the provisioned instance. Note that propagation may take up to 48 hours.

vCPU	RAM	Local storage	Location
8	32 GB	240 GB	Germany

Phase III: Configure

Perhaps unintuitively, this was the easiest part. Thanks to the nixpkgs community contributions of high-quality modules[^module] for production-ready services[^service], configuring a fully self-hosted livestreaming service safely behind a reverse proxy was scarcely more involved than toggling enable. Consider the following Nix code:

{
  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ]
    ++ [ config.services.owncast.rtmp-port ];

  security.acme.defaults.email = "admin@example.com";

  services.owncast.enable = true;

  services.caddy = {
    enable = true;
    email = config.security.acme.defaults.email;
    virtualHosts = {
      "live.nixos.org".extraConfig = let
        owncastWebService = "http://${config.services.owncast.listen}:${
            toString config.services.owncast.port
          }";
      in ''
        encode gzip
        reverse_proxy ${owncastWebService}
      '';
    };
  };
}

Demonstrating the seamless UX of a well-written NixOS module, the Owncast configuration is completely out-of-the-box; using all defaults, one line installs and activates the service, initializes all necessary state (including a SQLite database owncast.db that stores important service configuration such as administrative credentials) in /var/lib/owncast, and binds the web server to 127.0.0.1:8080.

The Caddy module is similarly loaded (with goodies). The only customization necessary here was to specify the domain we prepared (in the last step of the provisioning phase above) as a virtual host from which Caddy can forward client requests to the backend Owncast web server. For good measure, we also specified an email address for Caddy to use when setting up SSL on our behalf. This is the email address to use for account creation and correspondence from the SSL certificate authority, which is Let's Encrypt by default.

The remaining configuration simply opens ports in the system firewall for HTTP, HTTPS, and RTMP. Note that the RTMP port is also an Owncast module-specified default.

That’s the entirety of the NixOS configuration specific to our use case; all additional configuration (e.g., importing generated hardware configuration, enabling SSH and adding appropriate keys, defining Nix garbage collection rules, etc.) is simply boilerplate.

Phase IV: Deploy

With the instance provisioned and the configuration prepared, it was about time to introduce the two, marking the beautiful beginning of a successful working relationship. This is generally a two-step process:

Install NixOS on the instance. A provider may make this very easy (by providing a template image), moderately easy (by allowing a custom ISO to be uploaded), or hit-or-miss (by providing an image for a non-NixOS distribution from which NixOS may be converted with NixOS-Infect or NIXOS_LUSTRATE).

Our provider didn’t do us too many favors in this regard. They were known to play nice with nixos-infected installations, however, so we went with that.
Deploy the configuration. Note that several tools exist to automate this process: deploy-rs is wildly popular for flake-based configurations, and Cachix Deploy is a promising new offering (just to name two).

We were quite frankly in a hurry, however, and found it perfectly acceptable to do it the old-fashioned way:
1. Access the host over SSH.
2. Clone the configuration.
3. Run nixos-rebuild switch to build and activate the configuration (and make it the boot default).

With this, we had a fully operational production server. For the finishing touches, we would make just a few program-specific tweaks.

Streaming service configuration

As previously mentioned, much of the Owncast configuration is stored as mutable state, enabling the service to be modified on-the-fly from the administrative web UI. A suggested procedure follows:

Log in to the administrative web UI:
- URL: https://<target FQDN>/admin/ (e.g., https://live.nixos.org/admin/)
- User name: admin
- Password: <stream key> (abc123 by default)
In server settings, set a new Stream Key.

Note that this is also the administrative web UI password.
In general settings, modify instance details, tags, and social handles as appropriate.
In video settings:
- Add stream variants to enable adaptive bitrate streaming to accommodate users on various-quality networks.
  
  The following table may be used as a guideline:
  
  Encoder Name Resolution (WxH) Bitrate Framerate
  
  x264 SD 854x480 800-1200 kbps 25 or 30 fps
  
  x264 HD 1280x720 1200-1900 kbps 25 or 30 fps
  
  x264 FHD 1920x1080 1900-4500 kbps 25 or 30 fps
  
  Note that some services recommend a higher bitrate for HD:
  
  Encoder Name Resolution (WxH) Bitrate Framerate
  
  x264 HD 1280x720 3000 kbps 25 or 30 fps
  
  x264 FHD 1920x1080 4500 kbps 25 or 30 fps
  
  Our stress tests showed that the use of standard variants with our VPS were reportedly adequate for most users but problematic for some in Japan, Thailand, and the UK. Based on these results, object storage and CDN caching are recommended.
  
  Additional notes:
  - For interactive live streams (e.g., lectures with Q&A sessions), consider decreasing the latency buffer to Low.
  - For further tuning, consider referring to a bitrate calculator (e.g., Bitrate Calc).

Encoder	Name	Resolution (WxH)	Bitrate	Framerate
x264	SD	854x480	800-1200 kbps	25 or 30 fps
x264	HD	1280x720	1200-1900 kbps	25 or 30 fps
x264	FHD	1920x1080	1900-4500 kbps	25 or 30 fps

Encoder	Name	Resolution (WxH)	Bitrate	Framerate
x264	HD	1280x720	3000 kbps	25 or 30 fps
x264	FHD	1920x1080	4500 kbps	25 or 30 fps

Streaming client configuration

With the server side all set, it was time to get streaming! The basic procedure follows:

On a local workstation, install and launch OBS Studio (obs-studio in nixpkgs).
In stream settings, set the following values:
- Service: Custom...
- Server: rtmp://<target FQDN> (e.g., rtmp://live.nixos.org)
- Stream key: abc123 (by default)
Go live.
Confirm the stream at the designated URL (https://live.nixos.org in our case).

It worked? It worked. Crisis averted with time to spare. 🍹

Next Steps

Following a successful first lecture, the SoN infra team is concerned not only with maintenance and optimization of the infrastructure we’ve already deployed but also with innovation on a larger scale. The ultimate goal is to contribute a scalable, fully self-hosted, documented, NixOS-based, general-purpose, FLOSS[^floss] conference suite. In short, we’re working toward a turnkey solution that can accommodate use cases ranging from the SoN Public Lecture Series all the way to a full conference experience – namely NixCon.

In addition to main conference components (e.g., administrative tools, breakout rooms, etc.) and general convenience features (e.g., collaboration tools such as shared whiteboards), a notable priority is the improvement of our accessibility story, e.g., through integration of the Vosk speech recognition toolkit for livestream closed captioning/transcription/subtitling (in multiple languages).

To this end, we’re working together with other stalwart teams such as the SoN Special Project for Jitsi and have received guidance and insight from the gracious maintainers of the NixCon 2020 livestreaming infrastructure, the crucial project of which our efforts will be a continuation.

[^ubiquity]: In the context of this article, ubiquity is scoped to societies who enjoy the free global exchange of information (i.e., unfiltered cross-border Internet traffic). Likewise, most refers to the majority of members of such a society when faced with choosing a method for applicable content publishing.

[^module]: Service module quality, while service context-dependent, is generally evaluated with respect to such criteria as:

- sensibility of included defaults (i.e., such that the service can be started without requiring excessive configuration for common use cases)
- exposure of a balanced set of options (i.e., such that the service is sufficiently configurable but not at the expense of module maintainability)
- inclusion of a balanced set of [integration tests](https://nixos.org/guides/integration-testing-using-virtual-machines.html) (i.e., that is sufficiently comprehensive for stable operation but not restrictively opinionated)

[^service]: A production-ready service is characterized here as a service that is appropriately licensed and sufficiently stable, secure, performant, and featureful for a given use case. Note that in the context of FLOSS[^floss], active maintainership is additionally preferred.

[^floss]: While the term FLOSS indicates a politically neutral position, this project prefers software that is licensed to protect the four essential freedoms of users as defined in the Free Software Definition. As a bare minimum, the term open source is used here to describe software that fulfills the conditions of the Open Source Definition.

Deploying a simple Jitsi Meet server with NixOS

NixOS — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

During the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing turned out to be an invaluable tool for online collaboration. While many used proprietary tools for this, there is one proven free and open source video conferencing tool that also gained much traction and stayed popular: Jitsi Meet

Primarily known for its publicly available service meet.jit.si, it is also possible to self-host Jitsi Meet on your own server.

Reasons to self-host

There are a variety of reasons why you may consider hosting Jitsi Meet yourself instead of relying on an already existing hosted instance:

You stay in control of your own data. When relying on a third-party service, you have to trust them, and in case you are using the service professionally, you may be legally required to sign a contract on data processing with the provider.
You can have your own branding. Not only does the service run on your own domain, but you can also customise the logo, welcome page, etc.
You can configure it to your liking. Depending on the typical use case of the instance, some optional features might be desirable that are not commonly found on other instances.
You can update the service when you want. If you need the service to work, the user interface totally changing during an important meeting may be problematic. By hosting it yourself, you can decide when to update it.

Why NixOS

So why deploy this on NixOS and not on Debian or with Docker? NixOS has many advantages for running servers. It allows you to configure your whole server declaratively, so you can reuse the same configuration for multiple servers. Also, because it is reproducible, setting up a server with the same NixOS configuration will ensure that it runs the exact same software with the same configuration. Finally, if an update breaks your setup, NixOS makes rollbacks as easy as running one command or rebooting, so you can minimise downtime.

Requirements

We will implement a small single-server deployment, so you need one server (e.g., a VPS). Its required specifications depend on how you want to use it.

For just trying things out, one CPU core and 2 GB RAM should be enough, though you will run into limitations pretty quickly. The official Jitsi Meet devops guide recommends 4 CPU cores and 8 GB RAM.

If you don’t care about meeting recordings, a 15 GiB disk could be enough, though it doesn’t hurt to have more. Recordings, however, will dramatically increase the resource consumption. You will need at least 8 GB RAM, if possible even more, and a CPU fast enough to keep up with handling the meeting while simultaneously encoding it. Obviously, it also requires a larger disk to store the recordings on.

You will also need a domain where Jitsi Meet should be available.

If you already have a NixOS server set up that has the required resources available, you can skip to Getting basic Jitsi Meet service running.

For configuring and deploying it, Nix with flakes support is required to be installed on your local system. If you have Nix version 3 or above, everything is already set up. Otherwise, you need to enable it explicitly.

Setting up NixOS

You can either set up a NixOS system as described in the NixOS manual or you can replace the default image of your provider with NixOS, either manually by using NixOS Lustrate or automatically with nixos-infect.

If you use nixos-infect, you must ensure that your public SSH key is already added to root’s authorized_keys before the script gets run, otherwise you won’t be able to log in to the new NixOS system. Consider reading nixos-infect’s documentation before using it to avoid destroying important data.

After the new NixOS system is up, we will set up the configuration file used to deploy it. For this we’ll use deploy-rs, so you need that available. You can either install it into your environment or just enter a shell environment to make it available temporarily:

nix shell github:serokell/deploy-rs

You then need to create the file flake.nix in a new directory that specifies the skeleton for the deployment:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-22.05"; # change this to your desired NixOS version
    deploy-rs.url = "github:serokell/deploy-rs";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, deploy-rs }: {
    nixosConfigurations.jitsi-meet = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      system = "x86_64-linux"; # if your target system isn’t x86_64, change this
      modules = [ ./jitsi-meet/configuration.nix ];
    };

    deploy.nodes.jitsi-meet = {
      hostname = "meet.example.com"; # change this to your FQDN of the server
      sshUser = "root";
      # When deploying for the first time, the server doesn’t yet have IPv6 connectivity.
      # This forces ssh to connect over IPv4 and can be removed after the first successful deployment.
      sshOpts = [ "-4" ];

      profiles.system = {
        path = deploy-rs.lib.x86_64-linux.activate.nixos self.nixosConfigurations.jitsi-meet;
      };
    };

    checks = builtins.mapAttrs (system: deployLib: deployLib.deployChecks self.deploy) deploy-rs.lib;
  };
}

Now you need to create the NixOS configuration in jitsi-meet/configuration.nix:

{ modulesPath, ... }:

{
  networking.hostName = "jitsi-meet";

  imports = [
    # You can change this to match your target system
    # (or remove it entirely if it doesn’t need special configuration).
    # An introduction to NixOS profiles can be found in the manual: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#ch-profiles
    (modulesPath + "/profiles/qemu-guest.nix")
  ];

  networking = {
    # replace those details with your network interface, the IPv6 gateway, address and prefix length
    # IPv4 will automatically get configured over DHCP (if your provider supports it)
    defaultGateway6 = { address = "fe80::1"; interface = "ens3"; };
    interfaces.ens3.ipv6.addresses = [ { address = "2a01:db8:abcd:1234::"; prefixLength = 64; } ];
  };

  services.openssh.enable = true;
  users.users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
    # don’t forget to add your SSH public key(s) here!
    "ssh-ed25519 AAAA…"
  ];

  # if your disk device is called differently, you need to change this
  boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda";
  fileSystems."/" = {
    device = "/dev/sda1";
    fsType = "ext4";
  };

  system.stateVersion = "22.05"; # change this to the NixOS version you first installed the system with
}

Now, you can just run deploy and everything should be set up automatically. After it worked successfully, you can remove the sshOpts = [ "-4" ]; line from the flake, because it should now have IPv6 connectivity.

Getting basic Jitsi Meet service running

What makes using Jitsi Meet with NixOS so nice is that there is a module for it. That means, you can enable a basic — but working — Jitsi Meet instance just by adding the following to your system configuration:

{
  services.jitsi-meet = {
    enable = true;
    hostName = "meet.example.com"; # change this to your domain
  };

  services.jitsi-videobridge.openFirewall = true;

  security.acme = {
    acceptTerms = true; # ensure that you have read the subscriber agreement (https://letsencrypt.org/repository/)
    defaults.email = "nospam@example.com"; # change this to your email address
  };

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ];
}

After you deploy this configuration, you should already have a working Jitsi Meet service.

Advanced configuration

Customisation

For customising the features and look of the Jitsi Meet web application, there are two options available.

One is the interface configuration (interface_config.js), which is deprecated but still required to configure some things. It can be modified by setting the NixOS option services.jitsi-meet.interfaceConfig. A commented list of all options and their default values can be found in the Jitsi Meet source code.

An example configuration that hides the Jitsi watermark could look like this:

{
  services.jitsi-meet.interfaceConfig = {
    SHOW_JITSI_WATERMARK = false;
  };
}

In the future, all options from interface_config.js will be moved to config.js. Many options are already configurable from it. Like with the interface configuration, a commented list of all options and their default values can be found in the Jitsi Meet source code.

There is one option I recommend you to set, prejoinPageEnabled, which enables a page to set up microphone and camera and lets the user disable them before joining a meeting.

There are many more options available, so it might be useful to look at the options and set up everything to your liking.

An example configuration could look like this:

{
  services.jitsi-meet.config = {
    prejoinPageEnabled = true;
    disableModeratorIndicator = true;
  };
}

Recordings

Using the Jitsi Meet component Jibri, it is possible to record a meeting remotely — that means without running additional software on the participants’ clients.

This currently is achieved by running a Chromium instance in a virtual X11 framebuffer, which then is recorded by ffmpeg. Because of this, it is currently not possible to run multiple instances of Jibri on the same host and therefore it is only possible to have one conference recording running at a time. In theory it is possible to bypass these limits by running each Jibri in its own container, but this is not officially supported by the Jibri developers and hasn’t yet been implemented for NixOS. Moreover, the current NixOS module only allows them to run on the same host as all other Jitsi services, which means they have to compete for resources. It therefore is very important that this server has enough resources to be able to handle this.

To enable Jibri, add:

{
  services.jitsi-meet.jibri.enable = true;
}

By default, it will record to /tmp/recordings. This and more options can be configured by setting services.jibri.config, for which a reference configuration file can be found in the jibri source code, or services.jibri.finalizeScript. The latter has a useful example in the NixOS module documentation.

An example that changes the recording destination directory and tunes the encoding options, but does not upload the recordings to a different server, could look like this:

{ config, ... }:

{
  services.jibri.config = {
    recording = {
      recordings-directory = "/var/lib/jitsi-meet-recordings";
    };
    ffmpeg = {
      #framerate = 30;
      #video-encode-preset = "veryfast"; # https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264#a2.Chooseapresetandtune
      h264-constant-rate-factor = 21; # https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264#a1.ChooseaCRFvalue
    };
  };

  # This is required if the recordings directory can’t be created by Jibri itself
  # e.g. due to missing permissions.
  # If it is under /tmp/ (like the default), this is not needed.
  systemd.tmpfiles.rules = [
    "d ${config.services.jibri.config.recording.recordings-directory} 0750 jibri jibri -"
  ];
}

Outlook

That concludes this blog post on how to set up a simple Jitsi Meet server on NixOS. But it still only scratches the surface of what is possible with Jitsi Meet. In the future, support for many of Jitsi Meet’s other features will be added to NixOS. Some possible features include clustering, authenticated participants, and joining a meeting via telephone.

Stay tuned!

NixOS 22.05 released

NixOS — Mon, 30 May 2022 19:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, I'm Janne Heß, the release manager for 22.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”.

The 22.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1611 contributors in 46727 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, Martin Weinelt, Bobby Rong, Mario Rodas, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Jörg Thalheim, sternenseemann, and Robert Schütz.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages. Removal of unmaintained packages is also important to keep the package set working and secure. This release removed 5874 packages that were available in 21.11. nixpkgs also includes a lot of modules that make NixOS what it is. This release brought 89 new modules and removed 27. In that process, the contributors added 1304 options and removed 359.

Nix 2.8

This release brings nix 2.8 as the default nix package. This brings users a lot of fixes, general improvements and increased performance. The main feature that was awaited for a long time is the introduction of experimental features, namely the flakes experimental feature. Users still have to opt into the feature manually (as well as the nix-command feature that was enabled by default in previous nix versions).

Graphical installer

Improving experience for new users is something that the NixOS project has been working on for a long time. After all, NixOS is a very different compared to traditional distributions. To make it easier to get started with a new NixOS system, a graphical installer based on Calamares is now provided. This installer starts by default when launching the GNOME or Plasma ISO and allows for one-time configuration of a new system.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Jörg Thalheim who helped with the changelog as the release editor. Also to Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. More thanks go out to Martin Weinelt for helping me with a lot of questions about the process and some subsystems, your help was greatly appreciated. Also thanks a lot to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we had enough compute resources and the entire infrastructure team. Additional thanks go out to Rick van Schijndel for going through all the pain of marking packages that do not build anymore as broken. I hope we can make the process more straightforward in future releases.

Reflections and Closing

This release brought a lot of features and improvements I've been waiting to see in a release channel. It was a great pleasure working with the community and seeing incredible amounts of work being done by the entire community.

Nix 2.8.0 released

NixOS — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 18:00:00 GMT

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.8.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS.

Here are the release notes:

New experimental command: nix fmt, which applies a formatter defined by the formatter.<system> flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake.
Various Nix commands can now read expressions from standard input using --file -.
New experimental builtin function builtins.fetchClosure that copies a closure from a binary cache at evaluation time and rewrites it to content-addressed form (if it isn’t already). Like builtins.storePath, this allows importing pre-built store paths; the difference is that it doesn’t require the user to configure binary caches and trusted public keys.

This function is only available if you enable the experimental feature fetch-closure.
New experimental feature: impure derivations. These are derivations that can produce a different result every time they’re built. Here is an example:

stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "impure"; __impure = true; # marks this derivation as impure buildCommand = "date > $out"; }

Running nix build twice on this expression will build the derivation twice, producing two different content-addressed store paths. Like fixed-output derivations, impure derivations have access to the network. Only fixed-output derivations and impure derivations can depend on an impure derivation.
nix store make-content-addressable has been renamed to nix store make-content-addressed.
The nixosModule flake output attribute has been renamed consistent with the .default renames in Nix 2.7.
- nixosModule → nixosModules.default
As before, the old output will continue to work, but nix flake check will issue a warning about it.
nix run is now stricter in what it accepts: members of the apps flake output are now required to be apps (as defined in the manual), and members of packages or legacyPackages must be derivations (not apps).

The next release is scheduled for 2022-05-30.

Thank you to all the contributors!

Summer of Nix 2022 Announcement!

NixOS — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Summer of Nix 2022 will happen from July 18th to September 30th!

Applications are open here from now until May 15th!.

Following the excitement of Summer of Nix 2021 (more in last year’s report, I am happy to announce that the European Commission, NLNet and the NixOS Foundation have granted enough budget to organize another community event this year. After some brainstorming sessions I am excited to share how we (an organization committee of ~8 people now) would like to organize this event.

Summer of Nix is a paid summer program where you can learn, meet, and work with the Nix community. It targets experienced Nixers and Nix newcomers alike to come together and work on a range of different topics. At the same time, there will be talks about Nix and presentations by Nix-using companies with the goal of fostering a strong sense of community and pushing the ecosystem forward together.

What’s new this year is that we offer …

a communication stream to write quality documentation, deployment stories, tutorials, and produce video content and podcast episodes;
an ecosystem stream to work directly on Nix tooling that improves the overall packaging and package user experience;
a packaging stream to package new free and open source software either within nixpkgs or as independent flakes.

All streams focus on improving Nix support for the free and open source (FOSS) ecosystem from different angles, as last year with emphasis on the packages sponsored by the European Commission via the NGI initiative and NLNet.

You can participate in Summer of Nix in several ways:

As a participant you will work full time on various projects together with other participants within the 3 work streams for about 8 weeks (with some flexibility, e.g. to take vacation). This is the main role in Summer of Nix and great for those who work in a team to share and improve their Nix skills, meet nice people while contributing to the community.
As a team coordinator you will lead a small team, arrange communication and mentoring, and guide technical discussions and decisions. You will also be involved in the overall organization of the program with other coordinators. Technical work in this role includes reviewing PRs and answering technical questions. Hours can vary, but on average the time commitment is about 12 hours a week. Experienced Nix tinkerers with a social knack are encouraged to apply for this role. If you’re interested in Nix and also enjoy team organization, this role is for you!
As a tech wiz you will pair program with participants, answer their questions, review their PRs, and show them how to get along with Nix. This is a great way to be involved if you are an experienced Nixer and enjoy helping others in a flexible way.
As a project lead you offer a project within the three work streams. You would work together with participants on this project, and provide them with guidance and technical expertise. This is great for anyone who is looking for support on their own Nix project. If you have an idea, please apply, but understand that projects have to fall within the three work streams and we will need to evaluate whether they can fit within the scope of the European Commission’s grant.

The compensation depends a bit on each role but will roughly be oriented on Google’s Summer of Code stipend for the participant roles.

Please write to summer@nixos.org if you have questions. In addition to this, we will also have a separate sponsor track for companies who want to connect with the community in this program this year. But more about this later…

Nix 2.7.0 released

NixOS — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 18:00:00 GMT

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.7.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS.

Here are the release notes:

Nix will now make some helpful suggestions when you mistype something on the command line. For instance, if you type nix build nixpkgs#thunderbrd, it will suggest thunderbird.
A number of “default” flake output attributes have been renamed. These are:
- defaultPackage.<system> → packages.<system>.default
- defaultApps.<system> → apps.<system>.default
- defaultTemplate → templates.default
- defaultBundler.<system> → bundlers.<system>.default
- overlay → overlays.default
- devShell.<system> → devShells.<system>.default
The old flake output attributes still work, but nix flake check will warn about them.
Breaking API change: nix bundle now supports bundlers of the form bundler.<system>.<name>= derivation: another-derivation;. This supports additional functionality to inspect evaluation information during bundling. A new repository 73 has various bundlers implemented.
nix store ping now reports the version of the remote Nix daemon.
nix flake {init,new} now display information about which files have been created.
Templates can now define a welcomeText attribute, which is printed out by nix flake {init,new} --template <template>.

The next release 149 is scheduled for . The next release is scheduled for 2022-04-18.

Thank you to all the contributors!

NixOS Community Survey 2022

NixOS — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 18:00:00 GMT

The NixOS Marketing Team is pleased to announce the first official NixOS Community Survey. Please take 5-10 minutes to complete it.

Since the Nix community has been growing faster and larger every month, it's gotten harder to understand who makes up the community and what everyone cares about. So we're conducting this survey to improve our understanding of those questions. We hope to use your responses to develop Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs to match your needs and come up with new ideas for growing and serving the community. And we'll publish major findings on Discourse and nixos.org.

All the questions are optional, and all responses are automatically anonymized. We will NOT collect your name, phone number, GitHub handle, IP address, or any other identifying information.

The questions in the survey cover:

Your background (e.g. What region of the world are you from?)
The projects you use in the ecosystem (e.g. Are you using NixOS?)
How you use the projects (e.g. Do you use Nix in production servers?)
What you like and dislike about the projects (e.g. What do you think is already great about Nix? What do you think contributors should focus on improving?)

This is our first time running a survey like this, so we're also looking for feedback on the survey itself to understand how we can do this better in the future! Thanks!

-Barry @ flox (bpiv400) and the NixOS Marketing Team

Summer of Nix 2021 report is out

NixOS — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Happy to announce that the Summer of Nix 2021 report is out. This report explains in detail the motivation behind Summer of Nix, and how it was organized in 2022. If you have comments or questions, don't hesitate to reach out to summer@nixos.org.

Nix 2.6.0 released

NixOS — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 18:00:00 GMT

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.6.0.

Instructions how to install Nix on different platforms can be found on the download page.

Here are the release notes:

New builtin function builtins.zipAttrsWith with the same functionality as lib.zipAttrsWith from Nixpkgs, but much more efficient.
The Nix CLI now searches for a flake.nix up until the root of the current Git repository or a filesystem boundary rather than just in the current directory.
The TOML parser used by builtins.fromTOML has been replaced by a more compliant one.
Added :st/:show-trace commands to nix repl, which are used to set or toggle display of error traces.
New command nix store copy-log to copy build logs from one store to another.
The commit-lockfile-summary option can be set to a non-empty string to override the commit summary used when committing an updated lockfile. This may be used in conjunction with the nixConfig attribute in flake.nix to better conform to repository conventions.
docker run -ti nixos/nix:master will place you in the Docker container with the latest version of Nix from the master branch.

The next release is scheduled for 2022-03-07.

Thank you to all the contributors!

NixOS 21.11 released

NixOS — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, we're Timothy DeHerrera and Tom Bereknyei, the release managers for 21.11. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.11 “Porcupine”.

The 21.11 release was possible due to the efforts of 1541 contributors in 41960 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Sandro Jäckel, Fabian Affolter, Martin Weinelt, figsoda, Artturin, Mario Rodas, Bobby Rong, Jörg Thalheim, Robert Schütz, Michael Weiss.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages and we expect this trend to continue.

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, figsoda, Sergei Trofimovich, Artturin, Alyssa Ross, Thiago Kenji Okada, Lukas Epple, Tredwell, Bernardo Meurer, and 477 others!

Special Thanks

Thanks to Domen Kožar for revitalizing the Darwin support effort. Jon Ringer for guiding the release process since NixOS 20.09. Vladimír Čunát and Martin Weinelt for their continued efforts managing and stabilizing staging. Thanks to Graham Christensen for organizing with Equinix Metal to ensure we head enough compute resources.

Reflections and Closing

The influx of additional interest in Nix/NixOS is exciting to see. The fairly smooth release cycle is due to the dedication and time of all the volunteers in the community. The continued growth and improvements have been incredible to witness.

Perl Diving with Nix

NixOS — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

This is a record of my time in the Summer of Nix holding my breath and diving into the depths of Nix to gain some Perls of wisdom.

Going through the issues assigned to my team I came across the the package for OpenFoodFacts a collaborative database that collects and provides open data on 1 million food products from around the world and counting!

Not knowing what we are eating seems like a strange thing. But really, how much do we know what goes into those vacuum packed bags that we open and consume daily?

OpenFoodFacts, I see your quote and raise you a Newman!

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.

— Alfred E. Newman

Anyway, enough preamble…

This project represents a deviation from the common usage of Nix to create derivations that package binaries. Instead, its main application Product Opener is a large app that requires many languages and dependencies which end up as a web service.

The back-end is served using Apache with the Perl Module mod_perl enabled (modules being how Apache is extended). This embeds a Perl interpreter into the Apache server, which handles the production of dynamic content.

As you can imagine there is a lot of Perl which is dynamically loaded by the Apache config file.

A word to the wise: there is a lot that goes into an Apache config file and the wonder of Nix is that it abstracts most of it away including the loading of the above-mentioned Apache modules. Unless you really know what you're doing, it's best to use the extraConfig option, which appends configuration to the Nix auto-generated one, as it has many twists and turns. It is possible to override the configuration file completely with the configFile option, but make sure you understand the auto-generated one first.

To have a look for your self run

nix build nixpkgs#apacheHttpd && cd result/conf

A minimal ApacheHttpd configuration in Nix:

services.httpd = {
  enable = true;
  enablePerl = true;
  adminAddr = "test@test.com";
  extraConfig = builtins.readFile "${src}/apache.conf";
};

The enablePerl option is what loads up mod_perl for us. :hands-up:

Slight detour into Perl: CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network and serves as the central repository for Perl modules. One way of defining the dependencies of a Perl project is writing a plain text file called cpanfile that requires all the modules to be loaded from CPAN.

So before even looking into the code contained in the project my first step was looking at all the Perl dependencies that were cataloged in the cpanfile – of which there were 65.

requires 'CGI', '>= 4.51, < 5.0'; # libcgi-pm-perl
requires 'Tie::IxHash'; # libtie-ixhash-perl
requires 'LWP::Authen::Digest'; # libwww-perl
requires 'LWP::Simple'; # libwww-perl
...

In the Nix community there is a ever growing list of *2nix tools that translates one package manager's lock files into something that fits within the Nix ecosystem of immutable declarative packaging. It was at this point that I started wondering if there were any tools like that for Perl.

The short answer is no. But there is some great support for adding something from meta::cpan (a repository containing what seems to be the entire Perl universe) to nixpkgs. It takes the form of the function nix-generate-from-cpan, which is also exposed as a utility in nixpkgs.

nix run nixpkgs#nix-generate-from-cpan <CPAN::MODULE>

for the win!

So a few nix run nixpkgs#nix-generate-from-cpan <Perl::Module>'s later I had 40 odd shiny new Perl packages. :)

This utility was great, but perhaps the reason there isn't a *2nix tool for the Perl world is that it is not fool proof. In my experience it just worked™ 70% of the time, with the other 30% of the time needing minor fixes: either adding packages to propagatedBuildInputs or running nix-generate-from-cpan for a Perl package that was needed as a dependency.

This might be an issue with the Perl ecosystem itself, as a cpanfile is not a lock file. The above example demonstrates it can be very vague (>=4.51, < 5.0), and vagueness is the enemy of reproducible and thus the enemy of Nix.

However in one case it failed drastically, and truth be told I was stuck on which way to go for a few days.

The intransigent bugger was Barcode::Zbar, a module that provides a Perl interface to the ZBar Barcode Reader. OpenFoodFacts has the rather excellent feature where you can just scan a bar code as a discovery mechanism.

The aforementioned nix-generate-from-cpan kindly provided

 BarcodeZBar = buildPerlPackage {
    pname = "Barcode-ZBar";
    version = "0.04";
    src = fetchurl {
      url = "mirror://cpan/authors/id/S/SP/SPADIX/Barcode-ZBar-0.04.tar.gz";
      sha256 = "d57e1ad471b6a29fa4134650e6eec9eb834d42cbe8bf8f0608c67d6dd0f8f431";
    };
    meta = {
    };
  };

Hmmm, rather bare. It didn't even include the Zbar binary as part of its propagatedBuildInputs.

Side note: propagatedBuildInputs here means anything that is a run-time dependency, whereas buildInputs are for dependencies that are exclusively build-time dependencies (e.g. tests and Makefile generators) - see Perl Packaging in Nix

After fixing the inputs it was time to give it a try.

buildInputs = [ TestMore ExtUtilsMakeMaker ];
propagatedBuildInputs = [ zbar PerlMagick ];

Where upon it failed with the message:

perl5.34.0-Barcode-ZBar> ZBar.xs: In function 'XS_Barcode__ZBar_version':
perl5.34.0-Barcode-ZBar> ZBar.xs:202:9: error: too few arguments to function 'zbar_version'

On investigation it seems that this module was last updated in 2009, and since then the zbar project has been forked and continued developing. The ZBar project now uses semantic versioning while the module is stuck with major.minor versioning.

nixpkgs topping repology's list for Projects up to date obviously meant that it wasn't slouching when it came to zbar and had zoomed ahead of the Perl module to version 0.23.90. (It was never clear what version the module was expecting, but 2009 put it at either 0.9 or 0.10).

It appeared to me that I had two options:

Naively patch this function so it takes 3 arguments in the Perl module and hope that works.
More realistically, create an overlay for zbar for a version that was compatible with the Perl module.

Option 1 - The Patch

Summer of Nix is all about learning, so I figured it was worth a shot. After a quick watch of the excellent How to create a patch for any package by Jon Ringer (go check it out) and a quick fiddle in git I had a patch file.

From e51b51a77eab1251babc58929a4d2107172a041f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Thomas Sean Dominic Kelly <thomassdk@pm.me>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2021 12:35:06 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] version patch

---
 ZBar.xs | 5 +++--
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/ZBar.xs b/ZBar.xs
index ad6fc56..97bd2c0 100644
--- a/ZBar.xs
+++ b/ZBar.xs
@@ -198,9 +198,10 @@ zbar_version()
     PREINIT:
 	unsigned major;
         unsigned minor;
+        unsigned patch;
     CODE:
-        zbar_version(&major, &minor);
-        RETVAL = newSVpvf("%u.%u", major, minor);
+        zbar_version(&major, &minor, &patch);
+        RETVAL = newSVpvf("%u.%u.%u", major, minor, patch);
     OUTPUT:
         RETVAL

--
2.32.0

Applying patches in Nix is the simplest thing in the world: just add it to the patch phase and your golden.

The manual is a bit sparse in this regard. The code looks something like:

patchPhase = [ ./version.patch ];

This is possible as buildPerlPackage is built on top of stdenv, allowing us to customise everything in the usual nixpkgs way.

Aha – something is happening! It seems to successfully compile, but fails the tests.

The full logs are below, but tl;dr the salient line seems to be:

#Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.

Ooof, undefined symbol… OK, so the module is looking for a symbol and not finding it in the zbar shared object.

There goes my naivety.

Logs

<details> <summary>Click to see full logs</summary>

this derivation will be built:
  /nix/store/gww59146rs399rjc3fnawrjng4pqf6dl-perl5.32.1-Barcode-ZBar-0.04.drv
building '/nix/store/gww59146rs399rjc3fnawrjng4pqf6dl-perl5.32.1-Barcode-ZBar-0.04.drv'...
unpacking sources
unpacking source archive /nix/store/g5kazmm00923w6rgcf5h6rzrlp7b1nhj-Barcode-ZBar-0.04.tar.gz
source root is Barcode-ZBar-0.04
setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to timestamp 1256327204 of file Barcode-ZBar-0.04/META.yml
patching sources
applying patch /nix/store/3ix6dz6lmifqrmbs24jbjh9z07wbscbi-0001-version-patch.patch
patching file ZBar.xs
configuring
patching ./examples/processor.pl...
patching ./examples/scan_image.pl...
patching ./examples/read_one.pl...
patching ./examples/paginate.pl...
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 162.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 166.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 171.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 173.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 181.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 183.
Use of uninitialized value $thispth in concatenation (.) or string at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 187.
Warning (mostly harmless): No library found for -lzbar
Generating a Unix-style Makefile
Writing Makefile for Barcode::ZBar
Invalid LICENSE value 'lgpl' ignored
Writing MYMETA.yml and MYMETA.json
no configure script, doing nothing
building
build flags: SHELL=/nix/store/xvvgw9sb8wk6d2c0j3ybn7sll67s3s4z-bash-4.4-p23/bin/bash
cp ZBar.pm blib/lib/Barcode/ZBar.pm
cp ZBar/Processor.pod blib/lib/Barcode/ZBar/Processor.pod
cp ZBar/ImageScanner.pod blib/lib/Barcode/ZBar/ImageScanner.pod
cp ZBar/Image.pod blib/lib/Barcode/ZBar/Image.pod
cp ZBar/Symbol.pod blib/lib/Barcode/ZBar/Symbol.pod
Running Mkbootstrap for ZBar ()
chmod 644 "ZBar.bs"
"/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/bin/perl" -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'cp_nonempty' -- ZBar.bs blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.bs 644
"/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/bin/perl" "/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/xsubpp"  -typemap '/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/ExtUtils/typemap' -typemap '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/typemap'  ZBar.xs > ZBar.xsc
mv ZBar.xsc ZBar.c
cc -c   -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -fwrapv -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -fstack-protector-strong -I/no-such-path/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -O2   -DVERSION=\"0.04\" -DXS_VERSION=\"0.04\" -fPIC "-I/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/CORE"   ZBar.c
rm -f blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so
cc  -shared -O2 -L/nix/store/gk42f59363p82rg2wv2mfy71jn5w4q4c-glibc-2.32-48/lib -fstack-protector-strong  ZBar.o  -o blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so  \
      \

chmod 755 blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so
Manifying 5 pod documents
running tests
check flags: SHELL=/nix/store/xvvgw9sb8wk6d2c0j3ybn7sll67s3s4z-bash-4.4-p23/bin/bash VERBOSE=y test
"/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/bin/perl" -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'cp_nonempty' -- ZBar.bs blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.bs 644
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 "/nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/bin/perl" "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-MTest::Harness" "-e" "undef *Test::Harness::Switches; test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/*.t
t/Decoder.t ....... 1/13
#   Failed test 'use Barcode::ZBar;'
#   at t/Decoder.t line 10.
#     Tried to use 'Barcode::ZBar'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.
#  at t/Decoder.t line 10.
# Compilation failed in require at t/Decoder.t line 10.
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at t/Decoder.t line 10.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::PARTIAL" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 48.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::NONE" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 27.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::SPACE" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 57.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::QRCODE" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 61.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Config::ENABLE" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 61.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::PARTIAL" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 69.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::NONE" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 69.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::EAN13" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 73.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::BAR" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 81.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::EAN13" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Decoder.t line 85.
Execution of t/Decoder.t aborted due to compilation errors.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 1.
t/Decoder.t ....... Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
Failed 13/13 subtests
t/Image.t ......... 1/22
#   Failed test 'use Barcode::ZBar;'
#   at t/Image.t line 10.
#     Tried to use 'Barcode::ZBar'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.
#  at t/Image.t line 10.
# Compilation failed in require at t/Image.t line 10.
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at t/Image.t line 10.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::EAN13" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Image.t line 101.
Execution of t/Image.t aborted due to compilation errors.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 1.
t/Image.t ......... Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
Failed 22/22 subtests
t/pod-coverage.t .. skipped: Test::Pod::Coverage required for testing pod coverage
t/pod.t ........... skipped: Test::Pod 1.00 required for testing POD
t/Processor.t ..... 1/20
#   Failed test 'use Barcode::ZBar;'
#   at t/Processor.t line 10.
#     Tried to use 'Barcode::ZBar'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.
#  at t/Processor.t line 10.
# Compilation failed in require at t/Processor.t line 10.
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at t/Processor.t line 10.
Bareword "Barcode::ZBar::Symbol::EAN13" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at t/Processor.t line 58.
Execution of t/Processor.t aborted due to compilation errors.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 1.
t/Processor.t ..... Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
Failed 20/20 subtests
t/Scanner.t ....... 1/3
#   Failed test 'use Barcode::ZBar;'
#   at t/Scanner.t line 10.
#     Tried to use 'Barcode::ZBar'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.
#  at t/Scanner.t line 10.
# Compilation failed in require at t/Scanner.t line 10.
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at t/Scanner.t line 10.
Can't locate object method "new" via package "Barcode::ZBar::Scanner" (perhaps you forgot to load "Barcode::ZBar::Scanner"?) at t/Scanner.t line 14.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 1.
t/Scanner.t ....... Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
Failed 3/3 subtests
t/ZBar.t .......... 1/3
#   Failed test 'use Barcode::ZBar;'
#   at t/ZBar.t line 10.
#     Tried to use 'Barcode::ZBar'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so' for module Barcode::ZBar: /build/Barcode-ZBar-0.04/blib/arch/auto/Barcode/ZBar/ZBar.so: undefined symbol: zbar_scanner_reset at /nix/store/n7hbdyp3bsmdxy2lcxivaxnq4nv8ndv3-perl-5.32.1/lib/perl5/5.32.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 193.
#  at t/ZBar.t line 10.
# Compilation failed in require at t/ZBar.t line 10.
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at t/ZBar.t line 10.
Undefined subroutine &Barcode::ZBar::version called at t/ZBar.t line 14.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 1.
t/ZBar.t .......... Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
Failed 3/3 subtests

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/Decoder.t     (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  1
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 13 tests but ran 1.
t/Image.t       (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  1
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 22 tests but ran 1.
t/Processor.t   (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  1
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 20 tests but ran 1.
t/Scanner.t     (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  1
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 3 tests but ran 1.
t/ZBar.t        (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  1
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 3 tests but ran 1.
Files=7, Tests=5,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.00 sys +  0.20 cusr  0.03 csys =  0.25 CPU)
Result: FAIL
Failed 5/7 test programs. 5/5 subtests failed.
make: *** [Makefile:1040: test_dynamic] Error 255
error: builder for '/nix/store/gww59146rs399rjc3fnawrjng4pqf6dl-perl5.32.1-Barcode-ZBar-0.04.drv' failed with exit code 2;
       last 10 log lines:
       >   Non-zero exit status: 255
       >   Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 3 tests but ran 1.
       > t/ZBar.t        (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
       >   Failed test:  1
       >   Non-zero exit status: 255
       >   Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 3 tests but ran 1.
       > Files=7, Tests=5,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.00 sys +  0.20 cusr  0.03 csys =  0.25 CPU)
       > Result: FAIL
       > Failed 5/7 test programs. 5/5 subtests failed.
       > make: *** [Makefile:1040: test_dynamic] Error 255
       For full logs, run 'nix log /nix/store/gww59146rs399rjc3fnawrjng4pqf6dl-perl5.32.1-Barcode-ZBar-0.04.drv'.

</details>

Option 2: The Overlay

Let's just overlay the source code with 0.10, a version from 2009.

This wasn't very successful as it seems the steps to build ZBar have changed significantly between versions.

However, I chose 0.10 not only for the fact that it was from 2009. It was the oldest version in nixpkgs.

So let's substitute the current package with this old one.

A handy tool I found along the way was Nix package versions which gives a nice web interface for finding older versions of packages and giving you the revision that they were in.

Armed with a really hacky zbar overlay, let's try this again.

zbar = final: prev: {
     zbar = (import (builtins.fetchGit {
       url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/";
       ref = "refs/heads/nixpkgs-unstable";
       rev = "12408341763b8f2f0f0a88001d9650313f6371d5";
       }) { system = "x86_64-linux"; }).zbar;
};

Sidenote: A more Nix'y way of doing this would be to import this ancient version of nixpkgs as an input into your flake:

inputs.nixpkgs-ancient = {
    url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs?rev=12408341763b8f2f0f0a88001d9650313f6371d5";
    flake = false;
}

and then use it via:

zbar = final.callPackage ./zbar.nix { pkgs = final; pkgsAncient = import nixpkgs-ancient { system = final.system; }; };

where zbar.nix is:

{ pkgs, pkgsAncient }:

let zbar = pkgsAncient.zbar; in

with pkgs;
with perlPackages;

buildPerlPackage {
  pname = "Barcode-ZBar";
  version = "0.04";
  src = fetchurl {
    url = "mirror://cpan/authors/id/S/SP/SPADIX/Barcode-ZBar-0.04.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "d57e1ad471b6a29fa4134650e6eec9eb834d42cbe8bf8f0608c67d6dd0f8f431";
  };
  doCheck = true;
  buildInputs = [ pkg-config TestMore ExtUtilsMakeMaker TestHarness ];
  propagatedBuildInputs = [ zbar PerlMagick ];
  meta = {
    homepage = "https://github.com/mchehab/zbar";
    description = "Perl interface to the ZBar Barcode Reader";
    license = with lib.licenses; [ gpl2Plus ];
  };
}

Thanks to Las for this Flake-ier way of doing things.

Sadly this still fails with the undefined symbol error. It seems we need an even more ancient version of Zbar

Where things float

It seems that we have reached the point of diminishing returns and that it does not seem worthwhile to figure out how to build ever older versions of ZBar in the hope that this might someday work.

So what next?

Perhaps we can convince upstream to take on the maintenance of this Perl module and bring it (and their own project) kicking and screaming into the decade of the 2020s. (Sometimes your brain just needs some downtime)

A few days after putting this project on the back burner I woke up with an inexplicable renewed enthusiasm for tackling this issue.

Looking back through all the resources I noticed that the maintained version of ZBar has a series of folders named after various programming languages and platforms, including Perl.

Interesting…

It seems that when forking ZBar, @mchehab, the new maintainer, also made the sage decision to include all the myriad interfaces for the library and maintain them!

Armed with this new Perl module that we knew worked with the latest ZBar library it was possible to construct a new buildPerlPackage that reused the src from the ZBar packaged in nixpkgs.

BarcodeZBar = buildPerlPackage {
  pname = "Barcode-ZBar";
  version = "0.04";
  src = "${zbar.src}/perl";
  postPatch = ''
    substituteInPlace Makefile.PL --replace "-lzbar" "-L${zbar.lib}/lib -lzbar"
    # This test requires network access
    rm t/Processor.t
  '';
  doCheck = true;
  buildInputs = [ TestPodCoverage TestPod DevelChecklib TestMore ExtUtilsMakeMaker ];
  propagatedBuildInputs = [ zbar PerlMagick ];
  meta = {
    homepage = "https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/tree/master/perl";
    description = "Perl interface to the ZBar Barcode Reader";
    license = with lib.licenses; [ gpl2Plus ];
  };
};

Et voilà, we have a Perl Module that interfaces with the current version of ZBar!

Addendum

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that there is a bit of trickery happening with the postPatch hook.

Perl has the incredibly unhelpful error command:

Warning (mostly harmless): No library found for -lzbar

As you can imagine this is unquestionably harmful and causes the tests, and of lesser importance the final output 😛, to fail.

This happens because for some reason our propagatedBuildInputs are not being added to the sandbox for the Makefile (which adds paths to NIX_LDFLAGS). Instead these had to be added manually by linking them directly in the Makefile.

It is unclear to me why this is and perhaps a issue needs to be opened that addresses this.

A quick refresher on `NIX_LDFLAGS`.

Nix differs drastically from other Linux distributions (and in difference is strength) and does not store header files and libraries in the traditional /usr/include where the compiler expects them. Instead, everything is in the Nix Store.

This means that somehow we need to make the compiler aware of the correct paths to these headers and libraries. This is where NIX_LDFLAGS (and its partner in compile NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE) come in. The ALL CAPS should give you a clue that they are environment variables which are used to furnish the compiler (by way of command line arguments) with these correct paths. This is all done using shell scripts that wrap around the actual compiler. For more information see the C section on the Nixos Wiki.

#05 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

Makes

A DevSecOps framework powered by Nix and the NixOS module system. Our goal is to help people setup a powerful CI/CD system in just a few steps, in any provider, while lowering the barrier to entry for the community.
Mobile NixOS: July 2021 round-up
Nix 🖤 macOS: June/July 2021 update

The Ongoing effort at bumping LLVM and macOS SDK.

Tutorials & Resources

terraform-provider-hydra

A Terraform provider for declaratively managing Hydra projects and jobsets, Determinate Systems' first open source release.
Modded Minecraft Servers

A NixOS module to help run modded minecraft servers, as a Nix flake, as well as a simple rsync wrapper script to help manage remote state of such a server.
stdenv.lib has been removed from Nixpkgs
Unbreakable Builds On Container Schedulers Without Containers
Cross compilation tutorial
repl.it: Dynamic version for Nix derivations
NixOS on the Framework
Container assignment

University lecture + assignment + tutorial on how to build a shell for the nix build sandbox with automated tests suite
Gitpod has shipped a template

Configured for Nix, it gives you pre-built, ephemeral reproducible development environments in the cloud.
Paranoid NixOS Setup
NixOS: build your system on Github actions!
New laptop - ThinkPad P14s
Bevy: getting started on NixOS
Nix Citizen

Experimental attempt of packaging a demanding and somewhat complex (in terms of wine setup) wine application by dynamically creating a wine prefix from the nix store path of a generated wrapper script.
Solving the y2038 Problem with NixOS and XFS

Or how to teach your initrd to add features to a filesystem on bootup.
microvm.nix

A Nix Flake to build NixOS and run it on one of several KVM-Hypervisors (cloud-hypervisor, qemu, firecracker, kvmtool, crosvm).
Inspecting coredumps like it's 2021

Jobs

Contribute to NixOS Weekly

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

Hiring event on October 27th 2021

NixOS — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Rumor was already out but now we announce it officially: we are organizing a big hiring event on October 27th where Summer of Nix participants and applicants can meet companies that use it. Participation is free but places are limited for organizational reasons to Summer of Nix participants and applicants for now. If you like to know more, send us a mail at summer@nixos.org.

#04 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

NixOS 21.05 released!

Jonathan Ringer, release manager, announces NixOS 21.05 release with 1745 contributors in 33474 commits.
How we went from supporting 50 languages to all of them

Replit replaces Docker with Nix and drastically improves support for languages.
Peter Simons has retired from Haskell maintenance in Nixpkgs

Please thank him for all his hard work!
The Changelog #437

Domen Kožar introduces the Nix ecosystem.
Compositional podcast

Nix in Production with Domen Kožar
NixNG, a late sibling distribution to NixOS, without systemd!

NixNG is a proof-of-concept distribution which works very similarly to NixOS, but aims to run well in containers and also smells more BSD-esque. Currently, it uses runit instead of systemd, but we're open to multi-init support and also to our own init system.
Nix 🖤 macOS May Update

Tutorials & Resources

Introduction to the Nix language for OO-Programmers
CS SYD - The ci.nix pattern
Data Science with Nix: Parameter Sweeps
Nix-ifying Rust projects

A template Nix setup for new Rust projects.
Nix syntax basics

Everything that you need to read, write and understand Nix expressions.
Nix Cargo integration

Utility to easily integrate Cargo projects with Nix. Tries to handle (almost) everything for you and enables configuration from Cargo.toml files.
Rust Nix templater

Utility to set up a template that uses nix-cargo-integration.
flake-utils-plus

Use Nix flakes without any fluff! (extension of flake-utils)
Practical Nix Flakes

Learn about Nix, Nix flakes, and how to use Nix flakes to build applications in various languages.
A test framework for the Nix process management framework

With the Nix process management framework you can write high-level deployment specifications of running processes, that can be managed with a variety of process managers (e.g. systemd, supervisord, launchd, s6-rc). Furthermore, you can construct multiple instances of the same processes and deploy them as an unprivileged user. The testing framework allows you to validate a service under all these conditions.
Tutorial: Installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi
Tutorial: Integration testing using virtual machines (VMs)
My Homelab Build
Writing a “Hello World” RiscV Kernel with Nix in Rust

Use Nix Flakes to build and run a 64 bit RiscV Kernel written in Rust.

Jobs

Contribute to NixOS Weekly

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

Applications are closed

NixOS — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Thanks a lot for your interest in the Summer of Nix program! We've done more than a hundred interviews in two months, it's been thrilling to see so much excitement over this program.

We are currently in the process of selecting participants and making the teams: stay tuned!

NixOS 21.05 released

NixOS — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, the release manager for 21.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.05 “Okapi”.

The 21.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1745 contributors in 33474 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Frederik Rietdijk, Sandro Jäckel, Tim Steinbach, Jonathan Ringer, Martin Weinelt, Mario Rodas, Robert Schütz, Jan Tojnar, Sterni.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.

This didn't stop us. In the last six months:

12985 packages were added
14109 packages were removed
16768 packages were updated

Likewise, our NixOS module system got bigger and better:

1527 options were added
290 options removed
400 options were updated

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before the planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: Fabian Affolter, Sterni, Stéphan Kochen, Robert Schütz, Martin Weinelt, Jonathan Ringer, Alyssa Ross, Andrew Childs, Thomas Tuegel, Malte Brandy, and 431 others!

Special Thanks

I would like to give a special thanks to Jan Tojnar and others for the Gnome 40 stabilization effort. Another special thanks should be given to Thomas Tuegel and many others for bringing Plasma 5.21 to NixOS.

Reflections and Closing

I think the RFC80 and RFC85 changes to the release process were successful in limiting risk and making the release more deterministic. This is the first release since 17.03 to have released in the intended month, although the rendered manual and official announcement were delayed a day. In the future, I hope to make the release as "boring" as possible, and have it be a time to improve the quality of nixpkgs' unstable and stable channels.

#03 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

RFC 0085 FCP NixOS Release Stabilization: ZHF on master, new timeline

RFC 0085 has been accepted!
Nix Portable

Nix - Static, Permissionless, Install-free, Pre-configured
The Summer of Nix

A two month train and work program from August 2nd to October 15th 2021 - great for anyone who wants to rapidly increase their Nix skills while doing useful work.
Nix 🖤 macOS Monthly Update
Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
nix-script: nix-shell shebangs for speed and flexibility

Tutorials & Resources

Building container images with Nix
Getting started with Home Manager
Using NixOS as a Router (NaaR)
My Automagic NixOS Wireguard Setup
Qubes-lite With KVM and Wayland
Installing NixOS on a Mac
Video Series: Introduction To Nix and NixOS
Video tutorial of Flakes in Nix 2.4

Video explains how to improve the reproducibility of nix expressions, why and for what we may need flakes and how to use them.
Build Arduino sketches like any other nix derivation.

Jobs

DevOps Engineer at Secure Compute Startup

Drive the adoption of Nix at a secure compute startup by developing and maintaining our CI pipeline and infrastructure.

Contribute to NixOS Weekly

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

#02 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

Introducing flox - Nix for simplicity and scale

flox makes it easy to build software or manage development environments with Nix at any scale.
Trustix

Distributed trust and reproducibility tracking for binary caches.
Recurring funding for making macOS a first-class citizen in Nix ecosystem

A call for companies/developers to contribute financially towards addressing major macOS issues in the ecosystem.

Tutorials

Resources

Developing an s6-rc backend for the Nix process management framework
envfs

Fuse filesystem that returns symlinks to executables based on the PATH of the requesting process (fixes shebang problems on NixOS).
nixpkgs-review-checks

Add additional checks and more information from build logs and outputs to the reports generated by nixpkgs-review.
Podcasts about Nix

A content addressable store for Nix with Théophane Hufschmitt and Binary Verification with Trustix starring Adam Höse.

Jobs

Contribute to NixOS Weekly

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

#01 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

RFC 0080 Change NixOS releases to YY.05,YY.11 accepted

The next NixOS stable release will be 21.05.
agenix - manage NixOS secrets - public beta

Agenix is a command-line tool for managing secrets encrypted with your existing SSH keys. It includes a NixOS module, age, for adding encrypted secrets into the Nix store and decrypting them.
Cachix: Postmortem of outage on 20th December

Tutorials

Deploying with GitHub Actions and more Nix
Scrive Nix Workshop specialized for Haskell developers
Installing NixOS on a raspberry pi 4

As the raspberry pi 4 is still not officially supported, this is a tutorial on how to get a base installation going if necessary without a screen.
Tailscale on NixOS: A New Minecraft Server in Ten Minutes
Encrypted Secrets with NixOS

Resources

autopatchelf - allowing arbitrary binaries to run on NixOS
Podcast: A content addressable store for Nix with Théophane Hufschmitt
Mobile NixOS: November 2020 round-up
tex2nix

Generate small texlive environments for your document.
NixOS in the Cloud, step-by-step: part 1
nix-ld

Run unpatched dynamic binaries on NixOS.
NixOS cloud images

Additional NixOS install images for Amazon (aarch64, x86_64), openstack and kexec.

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#06 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

News

deadnix

Finds and removes unused code in .nix files.

Announcements

Nix 💙 Deployments fund call for contributors

A fund on OpenCollective for the maintenance and development of Nix-based deployment technologies, starting with funding the NixOps 2 release.
NixOS is available on GandiCloud VPS

A NixOS server can be started in a single command or by few clicks on GandiCloud VPS.

Tutorials & Resources

Jobs

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#09 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

Announcing Nixpkgs Database

A database and search engine for the entire history of each package at Nixpkgs.
Cachix: write access control for binary caches

The trust of who created binary cache contents comes from who owns the private signing key.

This approach has a number of disadvantages when it comes to lifecycle in teams, so API tokens are now the default way to manage write access.
NixOS 21.03 Call for Release Manager
nixpkgs: Python 2.7 packages are no longer built
nixpkgs: Haskell packages now follow nightly
Mach-nix now has conda packages as a backend
Running NixOS on Pinecube
Our New Nix Deployment Tool: deploy-rs

Tutorials

Resources

Eight Months of NixOS
One week of NixOS
Moving into NixOS
Automatically OCR scanned PDFs in NixOS

Annotated code showing you how to automatically create searchable scans of all the documents you receive in the post.

Jobs

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NixOS 20.09 released

NixOS — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, one of the release managers for 20.09. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 20.09 “Nightingale” ✨.

The 20.09 release was possible due to the efforts of 1313 contributors in 31282 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Mario Rodas, Frederik Rietdijk, Jörg Thalheim, Maximilian Bosch, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Daniël de Kok, WORLDofPEACE, Florian Klink, José Romildo Malaquias, and 1303 others!

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.

This didn't stop us. In the last six months:

7349 packages were added
8181 packages were removed
14442 packages were updated

Likewise, our NixOS module system got bigger and better:

1119 options were added (61 new modules)
476 options removed
118 options were updated

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut. While we would like to release on time, a high quality release is more important.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: volth, Robert Scott, Tim Steinbach, WORLDofPEACE, Maximilian Bosch, Thomas Tuegel, Doron Behar, Vladimír Čunát, Jonathan Ringer, Maciej Krüger, and 190 others!

Reflections and Closing

I think that the 20.09 release highlighted a few weak points with our current release schedule. Discussions have already began on how to improve the process from the beginning, to help minimize risk, and set ourselves up for more successes in the future. I want to thank WORLDofPEACE (my co-release-manager) for helping me with release management items, Thomas Tuegel for helping with Qt and Plasma stabilization, as well as Robert Scott for his work with release stabilization.

#08 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

NixCon 2020 Call-for-Participation is open!

Conference dates: Oct. 16th – 18th, 2020. Live streaming on 2020.nixcon.org
20.09 Zero Hydra Failures has begun!

Help stabilize NixOS for the upcoming 20.09 Release
Cachix: Changes to Garbage Collection

Based on your feedback there are two minor changes to how garbage collection behaves in Cachix.
nixbuild.net is Generally Available
Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

Tutorials & Resources

fromElisp

An Emacs Lisp reader in Nix.
dconf2nix

Nixify your DConf files (Gnome3 configuration) as expected by Home Manager's dconf settings.
pynixify - Nix expression generator for Python projects

A tool made to adopt Nix in your Python project, and to contribute to Nixpkgs with package definitions.
Experimenting with Nix and the service management properties of Docker

Demonstrates how we can combine Nix and Docker in unorthodox ways -- we can replace traditional Docker images for dependency management by a shared Nix store, use Docker as a backend for my experimental Nix process management framework and use Disnix as a simple orchestrator for Docker containers.
Manix - Documentation Searcher for Nix

A fast Documentation Searcher for Nix. Its database consists of Nixpkgs Documentation, Nixpkgs Comments, Nixpkgs Tree (pkgs., pkgs.lib.), NixOS Options and Home-Manager Options.
Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages

Installing older versions of packages in Nix is easy but currently there is no official way to find out what revision has the package version that I need.
Local Nix without Root

Monkeying around with nix for HPC systems which have no root access and NFS filesystems.
BigBlueButton packaging and modules for NixOS

First preliminary release of bbb4nix, a way to run BigBlueButton on NixOS.
Working Through the Jepsen Tutorial with a NixOS Container Cluster
Developing Python with Poetry & Poetry2nix: Reproducible flexible Python environments
"Cloud-like" Infrastructure at Home - Part 1: LoadBalancers on the Metal
The easiest way (I've found) to create your own Nix channel
Caching your nix-shell
Have you heard the good news about NixOS?
Oneshot systemd tasks on NixOS
A Tutorial Introduction to Nix
Setting Up a Nix Binary Cache
Thoughts on NixOS
Building and Importing NixOS AMIs on EC2
Niv and Mach-Nix for Nix Python
10 unoffical NixOS packages worth checking out
Towards a content-addressed model for Nix
swift2nix: Run Swift inside Nix builds
cargo2nix: Dramatically simpler Rust inside Nix
Publishing Doxygen and Sphinx with Nix and Rake
Tailscale is magic; even more so with NixOS
Assigning unique IDs to services in Disnix deployment models
nix-copy-closure your nix-shell
Fully statically linked Haskell binaries with Bazel and Nix
Automated test on NixOS repository with Gitlab CI/CD

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#07 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

NixOS | Installation and First Impressions
Why IHP is Using The Nix Package Manager
Cachix Blog: Documentation and More Documentation
Cachix Blog: Upstream caches: avoiding pushing paths in cache.nixos.org
Redox added to Nixpkgs

Nixpkgs now supports cross-compiling to the Redox operating system. The redoxpkgs overlay has been created to fix packages for Redox

Tutorials & Resources

An introduction to nix-shell

What is nix-shell and how to use it.
Windows Functional Virtual Machine

WFVM automatically bootstraps a Windows image inside QEMU that you can use to run unit tests on Hydra for example.
Nix-Bitcoin: A Security Focused Bitcoin Node
django-nixos

NixOS-based Django deployment
systemd2nix

Convert systemd service files to nixpkgs syntax
On using Nix and Docker as deployment automation solutions: similarities and differences

Explores the concepts behind Nix and Docker, explains in which ways they are different and similar, and shows some examples how both tools can be combined.
nix-sops

Atomic secret provisioning for NixOS based on sops.
Custom home-manager installation with NixOS
Using Nix to build multi-package, full stack Haskell apps
Gnome 3 on NixOS
How to Setup Nextcloud on NixOS
Can't Hack This: A hard-headed introduction to Nix (slides)
Migrate from RAID1 disk to ZFS on NixOS
How to Make Sure Nixpkgs Can Evaluate
NixOS Raspberry Pi 4 Google Fiber Router
Setting up Buildkite for Nix-based projects using Terraform and GCP
NixOS: the good, the bad, and the ugly
mvn2nix

An alternative solution (in-development) to convert a pom.xml file into a Nix expression to help package Maven applications within Nix.
Packaging a maven application with Nix
Nix's Ruby & bundler ecosystem
How to setup a Nix binary cache using S3
Setting up LDAP Authentication with NixOS

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#06 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

Nix error messages proposal: phase 2, PR 1 merged!

Nearly every C++ file in the repo was touched! This will be the biggest PR, by far, for this project. Getting this in is a major feat!

Next up, I'm looking forward to finishing out this phase with showing the lines of code for errors, and supporting show-trace in the new format. I expect that PR to be much easier, both to make the changes and to review them.
Long-term reproducibility with Nix and Software Heritage
RFC 70: Merge nixos-hardware into nixpkgs
NixOS 20.09 Release Manager has been selected

Tutorials & Resources

So, tell me about Nix

An introduction to the Nix ecosystem and a collection of resources to get started.
NixOS: How it works and how to install it!

Thorough overview of NixOS.
Github actions powered by Nix Shell & Cachix
Tutorial: Ad hoc developer environments

Introduction how to get started with Nix for development in teams.
Tutorial: Towards reproducibility: Pinning nixpkgs

Introduction for achieving reproducibility with Nix.
Tutorial: building and running Docker images
Anti-patterns in Nix language

A few short notes what to avoid when writing Nix.
ZuriHac: Overhaul of haskell.nix getting started
netboot.nix: 15 second netboot iterations
Windows-on-NixOS, part 2: Make it go fast!
Reproducible Builds with Nix

How Status.im, a messaging app, uses Nix to achieve the 'holy grail' of reproducible builds.
Mach-nix: Create python environments quick and easy
homelab using Nix and NixOS
PureScript on Nix without dependency codegen
Nix & libSystem

How nixpkgs links against macOS's system libraries.
home-manager template: get started in a reproducible way.
Encypted Btrfs Root with Opt-in State on NixOS
NixOS ❄: tmpfs as root & NixOS ❄: tmpfs as home

Tutorial with step by step instructions for installing NixOS on tmpfs. Also an introduction to how to have a usable /home on tmpfs.

Jobs

Help Shopify rebuild our world in Nix

Shopify is looking to grow a Nix team to continue its roll-out of Nix-based environments to development, CI, and production, across macOS and Linux.

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#05 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Wed, 27 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

Nix 2.3.5 release
- Long awaited support for macOS Catalina, see the manual
- A bunch of options to invoke installer (pass --help to see what's there)
- Various bugfixes to the installer
- MacOS sandboxing improvements
Nix for GitHub Actions v9

v9 saves you a bunch of time when bootstrapping Nix (you can even disable adding of channels)
- Linux: ~20s -> ~7s
- MacOS: ~90s -> ~20s
Nix Flakes, Part 1: An introduction and tutorial

This is the first in a series of blog posts intended to provide a gentle introduction to flakes, a new Nix feature that improves reproducibility, composability and usability in the Nix ecosystem.

This blog post describes why flakes were introduced, and give a short tutorial on how to use them.
Earnest Capital Invests in Cachix
Obsidian Systems is excited to bring IPFS support to Nix

Tutorials & Resources

Shopify Engineering: What Is Nix?

Over the past year and a bit, Shopify has been progressively rebuilding parts of our developer tooling with Nix.

Burke Libbey dives into explaining Nix before diving into what's planned for the future.
Nix: Re-running Fixed Output Derivations - At the Right Time

Have you ever been burned by forgetting to update a hash of a Fixed Output Derivation? Or realizing it hasn't worked since a while during an update?

This article explores your options at re-running fixed output derivation on input changes.
My NixOS Desktop Flow
Learn NixOS by turning a Raspberry Pi into a Wireless Router
Installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 3
NixOS on a Raspberry Pi: creating a custom SD image with OpenSSH out of the box
Naive NixOS Rust Development
nixology: Nix screencasts by Burke Libbey
Keeping Up Appearances: Non-native macOS Light/Dark Mode
Super Bootable 64
Managing Firefox on macOS with Nix
Nix Generator Functions for Sway
Functional Fika — Nix and Haskell
Debugging the micronaut package and code smells in Nix
Nix Community Mumble

A Mumble server has been provisioned for use by the Nix community. Feel free to lurk in the lobby or create your own channels for hosting meetings and discussions.

Join with nix run nixpkgs.mumble -c mumble mumble://$USER@mumble.nix-community.org.
Nix Package Versions

A tool to find all past versions of a package that were available in a channel, the revision you can download it from, and a copy-paste command for how to install it.
nix-examples

Showcase of Nix usage for various technologies.
NixKite: Buildkite pipeline generation tool using the NixOS module system
Development with Nix in Python
Deploying heterogeneous service-oriented systems locally with Disnix

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#04 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcements

NixOS 20.03 was released

NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” had 1014 people contribute 21597 contributions.
Announcing Nixiosk

Declarative Kiosk systems built with NixOS.
Announcing Marketing Team

The marketing team was founded and had their few meetings. They already improved the website (see Learn page). If you want to join, you will find the details in the announcement post. Let's improve the presentation of Nix/NixOS!
nix-update

A tool for updating nix packages semi-automatically

Tutorials & Resources

The journey of packaging a .NET app on Nix
Create and Publish a Website with Hakyll, HAProxy and NixOS
Declarative, Decentralised, and Secure communication via Matrix, Jitsi, & NixOS
Project isolation beyond requirements.txt

How simple nix-shell integration can really make an impact on developer productivity.
Erase your darlings

Graham talks about why and how he erases his systems on each boot.
Using Emacs in a local Nix environment
Building a reproducible blog with Nix
Building a web app with functional programming

A long report on building a web app with functional programming - Haskell, Elm and NixOS.

Jobs

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NixOS 20.03 released

NixOS — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 23:27:10 GMT

Hey everyone, I am worldofpeace, one of the release managers for 20.03. As promised, the most glittered stable release is here: NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” ✨.

NixOS 20.03 Contributors

We had 1014 people contribute to NixOS 20.03 and 21597 contributions. Thank you soo much, each contribution is valued.

Top 10 ordered by commits

Rank

Name

Commits

Frederik Rietdijk

1573

worldofpeace

1273

Mario Rodas

1256

Maximilian Bosch

720

Jan Tojnar

491

Jonathan Ringer

477

Jörg Thalheim

414

Florian Klink

393

Will Dietz

373

volth

356

My Reflections and Closing

Being release manager for 20.03 has been a poignant moment for me in being part of NixOS. I had my goals that I set out before I was appointed, but I was really surprised how respected I am in the community. My primary goal was “work collaboratively with all participants in the NixOS project and being supportive of their efforts”. I feel I ✨ shine best in that dynamic in the project, so this really was perfect for me. I hope releasing NixOS has felt better for those involved. With the seeds I’ve planted it should continue to bloom this way.

I’d like to thank Samuel Leathers, my co-release manager, for his congruent effervescence and guidance; Graham Christensen for his organizational encouragement; and obviously every last person I got to work with. Thanks ✌️

In leisure, pause, and experimental grace. worldofpeace.

#03 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Introducing nixbuild.net

nixbuild.net is nix build as a service, allowing you to easily run distributed builds without having to setup, scale and maintain build servers.
Proposal for improving Nix error messages

Crowdfunding campaign to fund a complete rework of error messages in Nix to improve beginner's experience and make working with the tooling pleasant.
Contextflow is hiring!

contextflow is an award winning Vienna-based startup using AI on 3D medical images to improve radiology workflows. We are looking for a fulltime Senior DevOps and Backend Engineer (m/f) with NixOs experience.
nix-freeze-tree

nix-freeze-tree is a utility that walks a directory tree, and writes out Nix expressions which rebuild that tree. The generated expressions have two important properties: a) Each file in the tree is built by a separate fixed-output derivation, and b) Directories are built by derivations that symlink their contents recursively. If you are using nix copy to ship a derivation between nix stores, copying the derivation built by evaluating the output of nix-freeze-tree can reuse existing files in the destination store, as fixed-output derivations can be checked against a hash before copying.
I was wrong about Nix

Christine talks about packaging Go and Elm application with Nix and publishing binaries to Cachix.
How I start: Nix

Christine talks about packaging and developing Rust with Nix.
Nixpkgs reached 200,000 commits milestone

It took less than 3 years since previous 100,000 milestone
Nix for Coq Development

Yann talks about how to package Coq with Nix using a simple tutorial.
Possible nixpkgs-based Google Summer of Code projects .

We want to try to use nix(pkgs) to build perfectly reproducible environments in a context where the users wouldn’t even be aware that nix is a thing that exists (unless, obviously, they want to know). This is in the context of a bioinformatics application, written in Haskell, but the nixpkgs integration can be done without writing Haskell code (NGLess)
Nix: override packages with overlays

Thomas has written a tutorial covering the problem that overlays are trying to solve, as well as how to use them.
Announcing TUNA Nix mirror for China users
Oslo NixOS minicon rapport
How NixOS Is Enabling Edge and IoT Projects
Interactive tutorials for using Nix and Nixpkgs written as a Jupyter notebook

made by @FRidh
A declarative process manager-agnostic deployment framework based on Nix tooling

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#02 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

nix-simple-deploy

A Rust rewrite of unmaintained nix-deploy. Any feedback appreciated!
cached-nix-shell: Instant startup time for nix-shell

Caching layer for nix-shell featuring instant startup time on subsequent runs. It supports NixOS and Linux.
structured-attrs

An explanation of __structuredAttrs in stdenv and why enabling it would be desirable.
nix-bisect: Bisect Nix Builds

A small command-line tool and python library that makes bisecting nix builds much more convenient. It prevents common pitfalls in simple cases and saves a lot of time in more complicated ones.
Job: ShowSeeker is looking for DevOps and SRE engineers
Cachix: CDN and double storage

Cachix infrastructure has been revamped to scale with recent growth in traffic.
NixOS: For developers
Oslo NixOS MiniCon 2020
Running NixOS on a consumer NAS
How I Work From Anywhere in the World

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#01 - NixOS Weekly

NixOS — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

News

Nix Notes

The Nix Notes is a collection of short notes about Nix, each contributing to the same virtual machine image. The notes show how to deploy the image to Digital Ocean, update the running virtual machine without recreating it, and more.
Deploying a fully automated Nix-based static website
NYLUG Presents: "Sneaking in Nix - Building Production Containers with Nix" by Graham Christensen
Lead DevOps Engineer with NixOs, Rust and Cloudflare
A Nix-based functional organization for managing processes
Windows-on-NixOS, part 1: Migrating bare-metal to a VM
Updating NixOS local VMs
Azure-cli v2.0 support

The python az package, has been added. Replacing the deprecated node azure package.
What happens when you run nixos-rebuild.
Reading Nix expressions

Summary of lessons learned at NixCon 2019
Nix application VMs: security through virtualization

Simple application VMs (hypervisor-based sandbox) based on Nix package manager.
RFC 0046 FCP, Platform Support Tiers

The Final Comment Period for RFC 0046 has started with disposition to merge and, barring any blocking issues, will be merged after 2020-01-12. Your opinions, comments, and approvals are welcome!
Mobile NixOS: December 2019 round-up

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#14 - Hercules CI launch, performance improvements in nixpkgs, single dependency kubernetes clusters

NixOS — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

Launching Hercules CI

Announcing general availability of continuous integration specialized for Nix projects.
Hercules CI Agent 0.6.1

Performance improvements, a bugfix to IFD and better onboarding experience.
Improved performance in Nixpkgs

Improving Nixpkgs setup by avoiding subshells in processing dependencies.
Recently rewritten Nix-on-Droid got accepted into F-Droid repository

Trying out Nix on your aarch64 or i686 Android device is now easier than ever.
Two big stdenv cleanups: Enable __structuredAttrs and treewide: set -u everywhere

It's time to clean up stdenv! By making our code less fragile, we increase the budget for interesting features. There should be plenty of failures, but many of them independent so we can easily parallelize the work to fix. Please come pitch in!
Pinning NixOps builds
Single dependency Kubernetes clusters for local testing, experimenting and development
RFC steering committee nominations

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#13 - NixOS 19.09 release, cache.nixos.org improvements, github actions for Nix, a number of talks

NixOS — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

NixOS 19.09 released
ociTools in NixOS

Katharina explains her recently merged Open Container Initiative support in NixOS.
Industrial-strength Deployments in Three Commands

Vaibhav demonstrates how NixOps works by implementing a small deploy script from scratch.
nix-emacs-ci

Emacs installations for continuous integration
Setting up a Custom Nix Channel
How to put your /nix directory on a separate device
Strange Loop 2019: "Functional DevOps in a Dysfunctional World" by Vaibhav Sagar
NixOS binary cache improvements
Mobile NixOS Development Log (2)
All Systems Go!: "Purely Functional Package Management" by Franz Pletz
Post-mortem on recent Cachix downtime

On 6th of September, Cachix experienced 3 hours of downtime.

We’d like to let you know exactly what happened and what measures we have taken to prevent such an event from happening in the future.
Cachix & Nix Install actions for GitHub

Start using GitHub Actions with Nix&Cachix with a simple snippet of YAML.
Hercules CI Agent 0.5.0 with Terraform support and simpler configuration

Hercules CI Agent can now be deployed with terraform with only a few steps.
RFC 0052 FCP, Away from static IDs

The Final Comment Period for RFC 0052 has started and, barring any blocking issues, will be merged after 2019-10-18. Your opinions, comments, and approvals are welcome!
Tekton Pipelines - the Nix way

Building Docker images from Nix expressions in a Kubernetes cluster with the Tekton Pipeline project.

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NixOS 19.09 released

NixOS — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 19.09 “Loris” has been released, the twelfth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

#12 - Mobile NixOS, import-from-derivation, one-page introduction, runtime type-checker, a job

NixOS — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

One-page Nix expression language overview

Vincent wrote a one-page introduction to Nix language, covering language features you'll most likely encounter from day one.
Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS

Using the boot.loader.grub.mirroredBoots module to have redundant boots with an encrypted ZFS mirror.
Serokell is hiring Nix DevOps Engineers

Serokell is looking for remote full-time Nix SREs.
Yants - Yet Another Nix Type System

Yants is a small runtime type-checker for Nix that can check primitives (int, string, etc.) , simple polymorphic types (option, list, attrs), structs/records, enums, functions and more.

It features pattern matching for enum variants, pretty-printed function types and other niceties! Check out the link for screenshots.
NixOS RFC Process

Robin goes into the details of RFC process that Nix community established last year.
Easy IHaskell Docker Images with Nix

Vaibhav shows how to use Nix to package iHaskell into a docker container.
Mobile NixOS: the Present and the Future

Samuel announced full-time involvement into NixOS mobile and the current state of the project.
Pre-commit git hooks with Nix

Git hooks, packaged with Nix, enforced at development time and on a CI.
All the versions with Nix

Matthew explains how to use multiple revisions of nixpkgs to mix stable vs. bleeding edge packages.
Native support for import-from-derivation

Hercules CI gained a crucial feature for development teams. The post goes into the detail how evaluation and realization phases work in Nix and why sometimes mixing the two makes sense.

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#11 - Nixery, nixfmt and Cachix releases, NixCon 2019 tickets, a job and first impressions post

NixOS — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

nix is now easier to bootstrap on Linux distributions without previous nix installation.

Non-NixOS users are encouraged to try and report whether the improved autoconf checks make it easier to build it from source.
static-haskell-nix started a crowd-funding on OpenCollective during ZuriHac to get its own dedicated Hetzner build server. Amazingly, the funding goal was reached within only 4 days!
A big rework of the gstreamer package landed in nixpkgs with the upgrade to 1.16.

It also demonstrates how meson-build-system-based projects can be configured to complain loudly about any missing dependencies, as opposed to silently disabling features (like many autoconf based build systems do).
Cachix 0.2.1 released

Upgrade via the usual: $ nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install

Notable improvement is the default compression level which has been lowered to increase bandwidth throughput and it's overridable via --compression-level.
[Hercules CI #5 update requiredSystemFeatures, Cachix and Darwin support](https://blog.hercules-ci.com/sprints,/hercules-ci/2019/07/09/development-update-5-cachix-da rwin/)

Preview access for the CI has been given to all subscribers as we've reached feature parity for the public launch.
The NixCon 2019 ticket sale has started
Functional DevOps in a Dysfunctional World
Leveraging NixOS tests in your project
Obsidian Systems is hiring a Nix engineer
nixfmt 0.2 release

Please try it out on your code and give us feedback!
Nixery is a tiny service that implements Docker’s registry protocol for serving images
Nix and NixOS: first impressions

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#10 - Redox on NixOS, ad-hoc container images, nix-mode.el, static site deploys, a job

NixOS — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

A set of patches to build Redox on NixOS

An attempt to embrace Nix instead of constantly working around the limitations to build Redox OS. The ultra optimistic long-term goal is to be a competing alternative to the GNU make build system the project currently uses, to make Redox builds reproducible and reliable.
An experiment: ad-hoc container images

made by @tazjin
Using NixOS as an stateless workstation

EuAndreh goes through the journey of installing NixOS on their laptop.
nix-mode.el 1.4.1 release

Added support for the indentation function smie-indent-line in NixOS/nix-mode#79 & NixOS/nix-mode#80. Thanks to @j-piecuch and @matthewbauer for the work and testing.
PDT Partners is looking for an experienced engineer

For our Software Infrastructure team, which is responsible for our build, packaging, CI and deployment tooling. We’re using Nix to package our complex C++ and Python stack, and as part of our wider development environment for our fast-moving trading and research applications.
Complete overkill or exactly right? Deploying a static site using nix
Introducing nixpkgs-tungsten: The most convenient way to working with Tungsten Fabric

Tungsten Fabric is the open-source offering of Contrail by Juniper Networks - a powerful SDN solution used by many big names in the IT industry. The nixpkgs-tungsten project provides tools and workflows that make it much easier to work with, and on Tungsten Fabric itself.

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#09 - autobake, setup.nix for Python, macOS stdenv updates, nixfmt, Elm tooling, gitignore and a job

NixOS — Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

autobake: Create build recipes through automated trial and error
GNU Guix 1.0.0 released
RFC on setup.nix Python development tool

Asko proposes a new Python development tool
SNM release compatible with NixOS 19.03
nixpkgs macOS stdenv updates

Matthew's overview of recent stdenv updates, which also bumps minimal supported version to 10.12.
Phoronix: NixOS Takes Action After 1.2GB/s ZFS Encryption Speed Drops To 200MB/s With Linux 5.0+
nixfmt

Serokell releases nixfmt 0.1 with a focus on speed and are looking for feedback.
Elm tooling for Nix

Linux and macOS packages tooling for Elm: elm-test, elm-verify-examples, elm-analyse, elm-doc-preview
Groq.com is seeking a DevOps Engineer

who will be responsible for maintaining and developing services such as build system, monitoring, name resolution, configuration management, and the like. Groq uses formal methods, Haskell, and NixOS to build processors.
Hercules CI sprint #3 report
- hercules-agent-0.2 release
- precise derivations support for upcoming multi-agent and multi-architecture support
- focus for next two weeks is Cachix and Darwin support
gitignore for Nix

Robert announces gitignore that precisely emulates git behaviour and goes into details how it compares with existing solutions
VPS prgmr updates NixOS installer to 19.03

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#08 - C++ packaging, NixCon 2019, job, cross-compile RPI, Haskell IDE Engine

NixOS — Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

Setting up a C++ project environment with Nix

Jacek explans step by step how to package a simple C++ project and how to build against a matrix of different dependencies.
Anduril Industries is Hiring Nix Engineers

Please see this post or email travis@anduril.com for more information.
Software Heritage and GNU Guix join forces to enable long term reproducibility
NixCon Brno 2019 is looking for sponsorship

NixCon is happening again, if your company is using Nix in production, consider sponsoring our community event.
cross-compile NixOS images to Raspberry Pi Zero or Beaglebone
Haskell IDE Engine builds for all GHC versions

If you've ever been frustrated with mismatched GHC versions when using HIE, this project solves this by providing Nix builds for all of them, with caches for Linux.
Hercules CI sprint #1 development update

Development update includes features and bug fixes shipped in last two weeks and shares plans what the focus is in next two weeks.

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#07 - NixOS 19.03 release, IPFS, CI integrations and documentation feedback

NixOS — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

The IPFS team made package managers their top priority for 2019

There might be progress on its Nix integration.
Statically linked Haskell executables and optionally Docker images or Debian packages

Alexandre shows us how to use Niklas' package set to compile Haskell packages statically using musl.
Concourse CI on NixOS

Michael walks us through the process of setting up Concourse CI on a NixOS machine.
NixOS 19.03 Koi released

Linus announces latest NixOS release, a total of over 20,000 commits since 18.09, by 886 contributors (67 more than for 18.09).
Why NixOS is hard and how to fix it

Dave shares his experience using NixOS and gives some feedback what can be improved by the community in the future w.r.t documentation.
Hercules CI sprint #1 development update

Development update includes features and bug fixes shipped in last two weeks and shares plans what the focus is in next two weeks.
Mixing channels in NixOS

Garry shares a trick how to use packages from different channels. Useful when NixOS upgrade/update is blocked due to a broken package.

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NixOS 19.03 released

NixOS — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 19.03 “Koi” has been released, the eleventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

#06 - Lorri, tree parser and formatter, patchelf 0.10, NixML

NixOS — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

NIXML: nix + YAML for easy reproducible environments
Announcing the new Golang infrastructure: buildGoModule
Why I use NixOS
Announcing tree-sitter-nix
A simple formatter for Nix using tree-sitter-nix
Announcing Mixnix - Build Elixir projects with Nix
Target and Tweag announce lorri, a nix-shell replacement for project development

lorri is based around fast direnv integration for robust CLI and editor integration.

Try it out
PatchELF 0.10 released

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#05 - Cachix private caches, Termux, Artwork for 19.03, a rant

NixOS — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

Announcing Cachix private binary caches and 0.2.0 release

You can now share an unlimited number of binary caches in your group of developers, protected from public use with just a few clicks.
Nix in Termux

Alexander Sosedkin makes Nix on Android working on AARCH64. Inclusion upstream can be followed in the termux repo
Artwork for the upcoming NixOS 19.03 Koi release

Updated merchant report for the release
Why you should never ever use NixOS

Rant from someone who got his hands to maintain NixOS in AWS. Some complaints are silly (like kernel upgrade), but some are good points.

Jobs

CI / CD DevOps job

Recent IP development company is looking for someone with strong Nix skills to move the nix build infrastructure for our currently in-development mobile / web application to a CI/CD solution on AWS.
DevOps engineer at Groq

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Untitled

NixOS — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

Moving from Homebrew to Nix Package Manager

Salar wrote a step-by-step tutorial how to migrate from homebrew to Nix.
nixos/printers: declarative configuration

Tired of manually configuring your CUPS printers every time you set up a new NixOS host? Please take a look and give it a try to see whether everything works with your setup!
Static Nix: a command-line swiss army knife

Matthew shows how using statically linked Nix in a 5MB binary, one can use Nix without root. With an one-liner shell, you can use Nix to install any software on a Linux machine.
Nix SRE position in San Francisco, CA

While the job description doesn't mention Nix (yet), we've been hinted it is a Nix job.
Manage a static website with Hugo and Nix

Wael wrote a step-by-step tutorial for deploying a static site (blog) using Hugo static generator.

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#03 - Kubenix, kernel regressions and jobs

NixOS — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

NixOS is bootable via netboot.xyz

Try out NixOS, without having to even create a USB key.
Easy dependency management for Nix projects

Easily pin, update, and maintain remote dependencies for each of your Nix projects.
The Pantheon desktop environment has been added to NixOS (on master)

It can be enabled with services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon.enable.
The case of the supersized shebang

Regression in the linux kernel all together with backporting the issue into all stable kernels.
Diving into NixOS

Setting up NixOS and Windows 10 on the Dell XPS 13 9370.
Deploying k8s apps with kubenix

Zimbatm describes configuring Kubernetes using typed Nix wrappers to generate the Kubernetes YAML files. KubeNix automatically follows the API specification and validates your configuration entirely locally.
The status.im project starts moving to Nix

Status.im plans to migrate to Nix to manage its various packages and environments. Status.im looks to Nix for most of its usual advantages. Some of the provided examples are ensuring consistent development tools, and development/CI parity. They are also interested in Nixpkg's Linux and and macOS compatibility.

Jobs

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#02 - 19.03 feature freeze, EU grants, reproducibility, Nix in Debian

NixOS — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

Nix is now available in Debian
NixOS 19.03 feature freeze
nixos-generators

The nixos-generators project allows to take the same NixOS configuration, and generate outputs for different target formats i.e. ISO, kexec tarballs, qemu's qcow2 format, google cloud images...
Code archeology: 15 years ago Nix files had .fix extension.

Compare original MPlayer expression, it's first rewrite and modern view
hydra-in-a-bag

by @samueldr aims to provide a one-click command solution to running a hydra instance for development purposes.
Contributing to NixOS/Nixpkgs

Matthew Bauer makes great recommendations on non-programming ways you can help make 19.03 the best NixOS release yet.
NixOS Foundation participating in EU's Next Generation Internet initiative

Grants are available to make your privacy-enhancing or search-and-discovery project.
Is NixOS image binary reproducible?

Initial testing shows NixOS's minimal ISO image is already over 98% reproducible, thanks to the great effort of many contributors.
Mapping a universe of open source software

The repositories of distributions such as Debian and Nixpkgs are among the largest collections of open source (and some unfree) software. They are complex systems that connect and organize many interdependent packages. In this blog post we try to shed some light on them from the perspective of Nixpkgs, mostly with visualizations of its complete dependency.
How we use Nix at IOHK
Dhall - Year in review

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#01 - TerraNix, Debian packaging, elm2nix, RaspberryPi 3+

NixOS — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

News

nix-instantiate introduction

A polite introduction to use nix-instantiate and the NixOS module system to render JSON.
TerraNix

Terraform is awesome, it would be much more awesome with a NixOS module system.
Debian is packaging Nix
elm2nix 0.1
nix-env replacement for imperative package management, but with declarative core
nix-mode.el's alternate indentation function nix-indent-line has received some very needed indentation improvements in NixOS/nix-mode#61, and automated tests and Travis-CI support in NixOS/nix-mode#63 thanks to @etu and @matthewbauer.
Beginners Guide for setting up NixOS on the RaspberryPi 3+ based on the new aarch64 SD-Image built by hydra
Easy Peasy Nix versions

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#14 - Reproducible builds summit, Gnome 3.30, RFC process, linter, Arion

NixOS — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

Gnome 3.30 with wayland support has hit master

To launch a wayland session simply use GDM or SDDM and select the gnome session. Select gnome-xorg to run an X11 session. If you encounter a bug please cc @hedning on github.
Fast Docker Compose 'deployments' for development with Arion

A little tool we use at Hercules CI for process supervision of local developer environments. No need to export, load or garbage collect Docker images!
RFC0036 (Improving the RFC process) entered its Final Comments Period with a disposition of merge

FCP will end on Dec. 20, so go and check no important point has been left undiscussed!
Hercules CI development update

A short demo of CI development progress in the last couple of weeks including what have we worked on.
Nix-linter v0.2.0.0 released

Nix-linter is a program to check for several common mistakes or stylistic errors in Nix expressions, such as unused arguments, empty let blocks, etcetera.
Nix community attended Reproducible builds summit
Job: DevOps Team Lead

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#13 - Cross compilation for Go and Rust, home-manager email support

NixOS — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

NixOS 19.03 will leverage multiple cores automatically by default for builds and Nix 2.2 will have the sandbox enabled by default on Linux
Deploy a C++ web app on Heroku using Docker and Nix
Meson 0.48 landed in staging again
Declarative client mail configuration

In the past few months, some work went into home-manager to abstract mail configuration and generate configs for a variety of client-side software. Declare your username/password once and generate configs for afew/alot/astroid/mbsync/offlineimap.
Go cross-compilation landed in staging

This includes support for Cgo and buildGoPackage. Rust cross-compilation could follow soon.
RFC on improving RFC process
Released cachix 0.1.3
Call for new stickers design for events
OfBorg now uses checks for build status reports, greatly reducing Nixpkgs reviewers' email load.

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#12 - NixCon 2018 videos, Eris, NixDoc, Auto patching and jobs

NixOS — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

Blogs

Jobs

Engineer at Mercury

Mercury is hiring a generalist engineer in SF. Mercury uses Nix for development, Hydra for CI, and runs on NixOS on AWS.

Call for participation

Deployment Working Group
nixdoc to generate documentation for Nix library functions

NixOS/nixpkgs#49275 for the first generated documentation files and NixOS/nixpkgs#49383 for updated doc strings. Rendered example available here.
Nix docker image built with Nix
Easy PureScript Nix
filterSourceGitignore: Automatic filterSource by parsing .gitignore files from within nix

nix-gitignore tries to convert the fnmatch(3) strings in a .gitignore file to perl regexes valid in nix’s match. filterSourceGitignore opts for translation to nix boolean predicates instead and implements a subset of the gitignore logic as nix functions, aborting for unsupported parts.

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#11 - NixOS 18.09 release, Fastly CDN for cache, your first Hydra

NixOS — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

cache.nixos.org moved from Amazon to Fastly.
A very hacky proof of concept of a lisp in Nix
NixOS 18.09 Jellyfish released
Request for maintenance: Azure blobs
Your First Hydra

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NixOS 18.09 released

NixOS — Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 18.09 “Jellyfish” has been released, the tenth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Fastly supports NixOS

NixOS — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

We are happy to announce that we have moved our binary cache to Fastly. Fastly is a big supporter of open source projects and now NixOS is one of them! Fastly provides us with CDN capability, which previously was running on AWS CloudFront. Big thanks go to Fastly, in particular Tom Denniston and Elaine Greenberg, our friends at Infor and Packet.com and Graham Christensen for making this possible.

#10 - AArch64 builders, NixOps alternative, optimised docker layers, Hercules CI

NixOS — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

Exploring Nix & Haskell Part 1: Project Setup

This is the first of a series of posts, with the overarching goal of building up a deterministic Haskell development environment using Nix, including a modern IDE experience and any tooling built-in.
New Aarch64 (and armv7l-linux omg!) builders
New shirt and logo for 18.09 release
krops as an alternative to NixOps

NixOps, the official DevOps tool of NixOS, is nice but it has some flaws. krops is an alternative to NixOps trying to solve some of these flaws.
Developer friendly backdoor to VM tests infrastructure
Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix

Check out how Graham created Nix tooling to automatically build Docker images with great cache characteristics by using Nix's reference graph to separate out important layers.
Announcing Hercules CI - Continuous Integration service for Nix users launching beta in November

Some distinguishing features:

: - Great integration with Nix - Host build agents wherever you want - Free plan for open source!
Cachix (binary cache as a service) client 0.1.2 released
nix repl '<nixpkgs/nixos>' will let you check out your configuration results
Snowflake (language-agnostic, toolchain-agnostic build system built on top of Nix) v0.0.2 released
Japanese on NixOS

An explanation of how to setup an environment for reading and writing Japanese on NixOS

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#09 - NixCon 2018 program, macOS 10.14 Mojave support, Haskell and Python packaging tips

NixOS — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

The NixCon 2018 sold out and program is now live
Help make the Nix ecosystem's docs better

A lot of people meet DocBook for the first time when they're contributing to the documentation of older, well established open source projects like NixOS. Now there is https://docbook.rocks/ to help you get past the initial hurdle of "what do I do now?" I hope this helps!
Nix 2.1 has been added to the docker images
Creating Nix build function abstractions for pluggable SDKs
Packaging a Haskell library for artefact evaluation using nix
A way to develop software with Nix

This project illustrates using the Nix package manager for programming heterogeneous, multi-module projects. Notably, it provides a Nix library called Pkgs-make to save some of the boilerplate we might have to write when using Nix for managing a software lifecycle. Pkgs-make currently directly supports Haskell and Python development, but has the potential to support other language platforms.
Nix 2.1 is compatible with macOS 10.14 Mojave, make sure to update Nix before upgrading
travis-ci Nix support now allows setting Nix version
Building Customised NixOS Images

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#08 - Nix 2.1, NixOS 18.09 beta, new installer bootloader

NixOS — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

Nix overlay to program and use a tomu U2F token
#33686: New installer bootloader

Updates the bootloader, shedding one of the few remaining old logos, while also adding new features. Mainly, HiDPI options under a new sub-menu, allowing modesetting the console to a readable size!
RFC 32: Tweak the process of executing phases in the stdenv for better nix-shell UX

A proposal for making it easier to manually run phases of a build inside a nix-shell.
Real-time audio in NixOS
Bootstrap a zfs-on-root NixOS installation using only one command with Themelios

Themelios automates the entire installation process of a NixOS zfs-on-root system using any NixOS livedisk with an internet connection and your git repository. Themelios is flexible with many configuration options and allows for unique, per-machine customization.
Nix 2.1 released

Installer defaulting to single user, multi user support for Linux, constant memory streaming of NAR files and more.
Zero Hydra Failures for 18.09

Excellent opportunity to join the community get build failures down to zero.
19.03 to be called Koi
Recent Cachix downtime

A dive into what went wrong in recent ~2h downtime and steps taken to prevent it from happening again.

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Nix 2.1 released

NixOS — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 2.1 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

#07 - NixOS in production, nix-devel is now Discourse

NixOS — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

NixOS in production

Gabriel Gonzalez shows how to do a remote [nixos-rebuild switch]{.title-ref} while pinning nixpkgs
The [nix-devel]{.title-ref} mailing list is now replaced by our discourse.nixos.org forum instance which is also usable by email

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#06 - Formalizing review workflow, OfBorg update, String Context explanation

NixOS — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

An EPYC NixOS build farm

Graham explores and benchmarks an AMD EPYC build server against a differently incredible build server, finding the EPYC's builds are much faster across the board.
Understanding Nix's String Context

Shea Levy explains what is String Context, how it's implemented in Nix and shares implications on the use of the language.
PostgreSQL packaging is getting an overhaul

Easier use of plugins, version 10 as default, improved documentation, LLVM JIT support and more.
RFC: pkgs.overrideWithScope

Add pkgs.overrideWithScope. This function is similar to pkgs.override, except that it filters the arguments like callPackage does.
RFC: Use meta.tests to link from packages to the tests that test them

Aims to improve test discovery in nixpkgs.
How to deploy Mendix applications with Nix/NixOS
Layered build function abstractions for building Nix packages

An elaborate blog post that composes the stdenv.mkDerivation {} abstraction function from scratch by using a layered approach.
OfBorg update

Build time-outs, push-button deploys, monitoring transparency, and more.
RFC 30: Formalize review workflow

A proposal for a new review workflow based on a set of pull-request states (needs:review, needs:work). It is intended to help reviewers and contributors get PRs merged quicker and reduce likelihood of PRs getting lost. It also greatly increases the value of non-committer reviews.
libnix-haskell 0.2.0.1 released

libnix provides a nicely typed wrapper around the nix command line (for parsing, instantiating and realizing). It also provides wrappers for the nix-prefetch-url and nix-prefetch-git.

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NixOS Discourse forum

NixOS — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

The nix-devel mailing list is now replaced by our discourse forum instance which is also usable by email: discourse.nixos.org.

#05 - NixOS 18.09 preparations, incremental builds and other tooling

NixOS — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

News

NixOS 18.09 JellyFish to be forked off in a month

Whole Nix community would like to specifically call out a massive thank-you to vcunat and samueldr for being 18.09's release managers, an important and central role in each release. Thank you Vladimír and Samuel!
Snack incremental builds for Haskell is requesting feedback
Beginner's guide to cross compilation in Nixpkgs
nix-du: Visualise which gc-roots to delete to free some space in your nix store
nix-top: Tool which allows high-level monitoring of builds locally happening
Slides from the talk about Nix in Utrecht (recording to follow)
Job posting: Anduril Industries uses Haskell, Rust, C++, Nix and is hiring!

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#04 - NixCon2018, Nix Core Team, binary cache improvements

NixOS — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS weekly project is rebooting, expect a newsletter every Wednesday in the morning (European timezone).

You're more than welcome to submit new items with a short description on latest pull request

Domen

News

Patreon to support the NixOS OfBorg infrastructure

This supports Graham's infrastructure costs for the OfBorg tooling.
Introducing the Nix Core Team
NixCon2018 call for proposals
cache.nixos.org now more local
Announcing Cachix - Binary Cache as a Service

Reading

Tooling

terraform-provider-nixos: Terraform provider for NixOS and NixOps
nix-bundle: Bundle Nix derivations to run anywhere!
hocker: Utilities for interacting with the docker registry and generating nix build instructions

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NixCon 2018

NixOS — Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2018, the third Nix Conference, will take place October 25-27 2018 in London For more information, see the NixCon 2018 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS 18.03 released

NixOS — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 18.03 “Impala” has been released, the ninth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

#03 - A tree with strong roots \...

NixOS — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to another edition of NixOS "Weekly" Newsletter! Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen.

News

Nix 2.0 has been released
- discussion on lobste.rs
- discussion on hacker news
NixOS 18.03 release approaching

Mog has set up an unofficial redbubble store for various NixOS items (T-shirts, stickers, banners).
Nix has learned to load plugins
Nix workgroups area

Workgroups are used to facilitate working on components of the Nix ecosystems. As of this writing there exists:
- container workgroup: "building (minimal) OCI containers from the nixpkgs ecosystem."
- router workgroup: running NixOS on your router.
Google Summer of Code 2018 proposals were not accepted
Tracking RISC-V support in the Nix world

Note the followup message linking the publicly visible boards:
- RISC-V support for nix
- RISC-V support for nixpkgs
RFC 0023: Support musl libc
Patreon to support the NixOS OfBorg infrastructure

This supports @grhmc's work on the OfBorg tooling.

Jobs

Reading

Deploying systems with circular dependencies using Disnix by Sander van der Burg
Haskell developer experience in NixOS by Roman Kuznetsov
XMonad and Taffybar on NixOS using Stack by Dennis Gosnell
Install VirtualBox on NixOS by Dennis Gosnell
Parity as a service on NixOS by Alexander Krupenkin

Tooling

nix-update for Emacs - An Emacs command for updating fetch declarations in place
simple-hydra - A simple module for enabling Hydra
groking-hydra - A repository of collecting insight about hydra
dhall-build - A Dhall interface to the Nix build system
nix-update - A script to update package in nixos automagically
Disnix - Disnix 0.8 released

Events / Meetups

ComcastLabs Connect: Functional Programming
- When: March 9
- Where: Philadelphia PA, USA
- What: Among other functional programming topics, Susan Potter (@SusanPotter) is speaking on Functional Operations: Packaging, system/configuration building, and testing infrastructure with [Nix] lambdas

Contribute to NixOS Weekly Newsletter

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

Nix 2.0 released

NixOS — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 2.0 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

#02 - Life before death, strength before weakness, \...

NixOS — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to another edition of NixOS "Weekly" News -- we're still working on that weekly bit and I've half a mind to amend the quote to add "monthly before weekly".

Let me start by addressing everyone who helped put this edition together: By creating the content and helping collect items, you make the newsletter possible. Thank you.

Contributions for future editions are more than welcome. One way to help is by editing a release; we've added an Editor's Guide to help you.

There are some exciting things happening in the community, and I hope you'll agree.

News

Nix 2.0 is coming

This includes renaming Nix 1.12 to 2.0

Relevant are Eelco's slides from NixCon and associated talk about the changes.
Google Summer of Code is coming up

...and looking for mentors. Please submit PRs at GSoC 2018 project ideas.
Seeking maintainer for mvn2nix-maven-plugin
NixOS Vagrant box updated to 17.09
Pure evaluation mode added to Nix unstable

Jobs

Serokell is hiring Nix DevOps Engineers

Reading

Danial Barlow is developing NixWRT[^1]
- nix-devel NixWRT discussion
- Baud Games blog post
Stackage nixpkgs overlays by Dmitry Bushev
Syntax highlighting Nix expressions in mcedit by Sander van der Burg
Diagnosing problems and running maintenance tasks in a network with services deployed by Disnix by Sander van der Burg
OneDrive on NixOS using Docker by Nathan Bijnens
(French) Journal le "style fonctionnel" en vidéos (Nix, NixOS, Haskell) (Video, Code) by nokomprendo
Linux Distributions, Part 1: NixOS by Guillaume Salvan
Introduction to NixOS by @hackoflamb
Provisioning a NixOS server from macOS by zw3rk
Installing NixOS by Andrew McCluskey

Tooling

nixos/nixos-hardware

A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks.

The repository has been seeing a lot of work being done in last months leading by @yegortimoshenko (Yegor Timoshenko).

Check it out and contribute your own hardware-configuration.nix
nixos-mailserver

A complete and Simple Nixos Mailserver

Contribute

You can help shape NixOS Weekly Newsletter too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or loot at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

[^1]: described as "won't be big or professional like OpenWRT"

#01 - Phoenixes burst into flame \...

NixOS — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

The phoenix is a long-lived fiery bird that is present in many different mythologies from around the world. When a phoenix "dies", it does so by combustion and is reborn of the ashes left behind. It rises from its own ashes, in the freshness of youth, to live through another cycle of years. So in a sense, it never truly dies, but regenerates itself and lives forever. Just like this weekly newsletter.

Welcome to the 2018 NixOS "Weekly" newsletter.

We are back and hope to produce more of them this year then we did last year. As always contributions are more then welcome. The more people help shape this newsletter the more accurate it will be.

News

NixCon 2017 In Munich

If you haven't heard there was a NixOS conference. It was a blast. You can read a short overview of the talks or go ahead and watch them.

Anybody knows where NixCon 2018 is going to be? :)
Meltdown and Spectre patches for NixOS

Jobs

IOHK is hiring SRE with Nix/Haskell knowledge

Reading

Tooling

nix-diff - A small utility for comparing Nix derivations
nix-delegate - A command-line utility that you can use to run a subcommand with distributed builds transiently enabled.
nix-deploy - Deploy software or an entire NixOS system configuration to another NixOS system.
nix-bash-completions - Bash completion for the Nix command line tools.
nix-zsh-completions - ZSH completion for the Nix command line tools.
fc-userscan - Scans directories containing manually compiled programs and registers them with the Nix garbage collector.
elm2nix - Convert Elm project into Nix expressions.
stack2nix - Generate nix expressions for Haskell projects.
node2nix - New version providing initial support for NPM 5.x (that is included with Node.js 8.x)
node-hydra-connector - New API/tool to integrate Node.js applications with the Hydra continuous integration service and a CLI tool that can be used to control a server.
composer2nix - Generate Nix expressions to build PHP composer packages.
mkShell - For nix-shell-only scenarios, mkShell is a small convenience function in nixpkgs.

Events / Meetups

January, 09, 2018 - Berlin, Germany

Regular NixOS Meetup @c-base

Contribute

You can help shape NixOS Weekly Newsletter too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or loot at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

NixOS 17.09 released

NixOS — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 17.09 “Hummingbird” has been released, the eighth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix-dev mailing list moved

NixOS — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The nix-dev mailing list has moved to nix-devel on Google Groups.

NixCon 2017

NixOS — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2017, the second Nix Conference, will take place October 28–31 2017 in Munich For more information, see the NixCon 2017 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

#08 - Not all those who wander are lost

NixOS — Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to another edition of NixOS Weekly.

Major announcements include NixCon 2017 and the old wiki migration. This edition adds a new Tooling section for possibly useful Nix-related tools in addition to News, Jobs, Reading, and Events.

News

NixCon 2017 October 28-31, Munich.

Call for participation is open until July 31.
The Wiki is dead. Long live the Wikis!

This is the change that disable the wiki.

The old wiki has been for a while now with ongoing work on updating and migrating the content.

Current options are the Community Cookbook and the nixos-users Wiki. The latter is editable by anyone with a GitHub account.
Nix has a thankful community.

Profpatsch did some quick analysis of IRC messages. Summary:
- 1.9% contain the word "thank"
- 2.4% last year

Jobs

Reading

Intro to Nix Channels and Reproducible NixOS Environment

See also the Cookbook.
Use NixOS for macOS TimeMachine backups.
Building Maven Packages with Nix

See also the mvn2nix mailing list discussion.
My Journey into Nix

lobste.rs discussion
DistroWatch review of NixOS
Falling in love with NixOS

Tooling

pnix-shell.sh: creates gc-roots for all dependencies of a shell.nix.
nix-package-search: cached queries for nix-env -qa.
nix-zsh-completions: ZSH completions for Nix and NixOS tools.
Auto install/run missing programs.

Events / Meetups

NixOps Meetup May 26, Munich

Topics: the NixOps container backend. Possible hackathon afterwards.

Editor's corner

This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community.

You can help! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or help with the issue tracker to add other improvements.

#07 - You have one hell of a Linux system here

NixOS — Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

A few months ago a proposal to define improvements process (nixos/rfcs) was announced.

While many contributions to Nix and NixOS related projects fits into GitHub pull requests model, doing a substantial change requires more involvement from the community.

Two months later we can see that NixOS community is picking up on the process and RFCs are starting to show up each week.

News

First RFC to go through the process. What a milestone!

RFC 0004: Replace Unicode Quotes was voted to be implemented.

And there is a good list of interesting RFCs which are being discussed:
- (draft) RFC 0003: SOS: Simple Override Strategy
- (draft) RFC 0005: Nix encryption
- (draft) RFC 0008: Readonly recursive Nix
- (draft) RFC 0009: Nix rapid release
- (draft) RFC 0010: Nixpkgs development support
- (draft) RFC 0011: Per project config
- (draft) RFC 0012: Declarative virtual machines
nix-index by Benno Fünfstück

A tool to make the process of finding the packages and their files in nixpkgs easier.
styx, a static site generator in Nix expression language.

To give it a quick try:
```
$ nix-shell -p styx
$ styx new site mysite && cd mysite
```
NixOS at Linux Infotag Augsburg

Last week Linux Infotag Augsburg ("Linux Info Day") happened at Hochschule Augsburg. Like last year and the year before, a NixOS booth was organized. A Short Retrospective by Profpatsch.
And in case you didn't know ...

Nix package manager works flawlessly in Windows 10 Creators Update with Windows Subsystem for Linux

Reading

Events / Meetups

Thu, May 4, 2017, regular Meetup @c-base, Berlin, Germany

Generally, the event is not structured, we have no talks or presentations planned. It's up to the participants, what's going to happen.

Editor's corner

Help us shape next issue of the NixOS weekly newsletter.

#06 - I never wished a man dead

NixOS — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Or in other words: no more Perl in Nix! Shea Levy's last branch for his long-ongoing work to remove Perl from the Nix tool has finally been merged

News

NixOS on Packet.net

Over the past several months, Graham Christensen (grahamc), Tuomas Tynkkynen (dezgeg), and many wonderful people from Packet.net have collaborated on bringing NixOS to Packet.net.

Our collaboratioon started in January with Packet sponsoring many Hydra build servers. It continued by bringing ARMv8 builders to hydra.nixos.org. It is continued again today by launching first-class support for NixOS on the Packet.net platform, directly from their panel.

...launching first-class support for NixOS...

This allows any user to quickly provision four different types of powerful, bare metal x86-64 servers in minutes.

Sign up now at https://www.packet.net/promo/nixos/

or use the promo code "nixos" for $25 in credit.
NixOS Security Advisory: Docker Local Privilege Escalation

This is a fun one because it is the first CVE taken against NixOS. A milestone!

At this point we also must thank @grahamc and the security team for their heroic efforts. Their work makes NixOS a more reliable solution.

To help them please head to Vulnerability Roundup 26.
New node2nix (v1.2.0) released.
Takt has open-sourced a tool to deploy their services from hydra.
New pypi2nix (v1.8.0) release.

Reading

Events / Meetups

Apr 22, 2017, Augsburger Linux-Infotag, Augsburg, Germany

The Augsburger Linux Infotag is a one-day conference with about 20 lectures and 9 workshops on Linux, open source software and the digital society. Admission is free. We are representing NixOS with a booth at the conference.
May 27, 2017, Reproducible development environments with Nix: Johannes Bornhold, Munich, Germany

Providing build and development environments for Python based projects is typically not without challenges. This talk presents how Nix - The Purely Functional Package Manager can be used to provide reproducible environments for development and deployment of Python based Web projects.
May 01, 2017, Munich NixOS Meetup - Hackathon & Barbecue, Augsburg, Germany

Bring the Nix project you are currently working on or struggling with and discuss it with other people. Followed by a barbecue in the evening.

Editor's corner

As you can see last weeks were quite busy for NixOS community. What does that mean in numbers for last month?

Source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulse/monthly

Help us shape next issue of NixOS weekly newslettter.

#05 - Tonight We Ride

NixOS — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The 17.03 "Gorilla" release has been tagged! There are too many good things in this release to pick favourites. I refer you to the release notes instead.

Some fun stats:

~ 900 new packages since 16.09
~ 80 new contributors (very inexact science this)
~ 60 new services

News

Did I mention the release? Robin has been doing a fantastic job, thank him when you meet him! He's also had a lot of help of course, so thanks to all those people as well. It's a pretty long list and you can get it with "git shortlog 8def08..17.03".
Extra capacity is coming for Hydra OSX builds, thanks to all the great people that have donated to NixOS Foundation.
We now have an official RFC process. Thanks to zimbatm for writing our first ever RFC. We already have three pull requests so go forth and comment.
remove-perl branch just got merged to master. Time to celebrate.
Sander released Disnix 0.7
Théophane has started his work on typing Nix. You can follow along here. He's also answering some questions in this mailing list thread.

Reading

One long-standing issue in Nix has been the storage of secrets. Right now many of our services store their secrets in /nix where they are world readable. This means you can't have root-only secrets, multi-user systems are problematic, and if one of your services is compromised it can be used to steal all your other secrets. Eelco created an RFC for encrypting secrets at rest.
Monte is a dynamic language inspired by Python and E. It uses Nix, under the hook, for its packaging. Worth checking out if you are writing a new language and want to see how Nix help you.
A Gentle Introduction to the Nix Family by Rommel Martinez.

Meetups

Apr 4, 2017, NixOS April Meetup, Dublin, Ireland

Two presentations:
- Immutable deployments in Rapid7 by Ulrich Dangel
- Basics of Nix by Kevin Cox
(Future) Let us know if you are organizing a Nix / NixOS event.

Editor's corner

A substantial part of the effort of publishing the "weekly" news is collecting the news in the first place. If you see anything cool, want to share a job, meetup or presentation add a comment with your item at https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-weekly. It's super helpful!

NixOS 17.03 released

NixOS — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 17.03 “Gorilla” has been released, the seventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

#04 - Everything not saved will be lost

NixOS — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Nix, NixOS and nixpkgs are all moving ahead at good speed. The 17.03 milestone is more than 50% complete, and we merged 144 pull requests for nixpkgs just in the last seven days.

News

The NixOS 17.03 beta has been announced.
We now allow packages to be marked insecure, and you have to opt-in to install insecure packages similarly to how you opt in to non-free software. The option is called permittedInsecurePackages. See the updated docs for more.
Robin finished the systemd 232 update which opens up several new opportunities for hardening. It will also allow us to move away from hard-coded user IDs for less important services. Just use DynamicUser = true.
Thanks to Graham we now have aarch64 support, and it's even being built by Hydra! Many of you will have noticed already from the beautiful stream of emails for each succeeding and failing package.
Progress on the proposal for RFC which started from a FOSDEM discussion.
Move NodeJS to separate overlay repository? (discussion)

Reading

From Vagrant to NixOps by Hendrik Schaeidt

A walkthrough to configure a symfony2 project with nginx, mysql, and php-fpm from scratch.

Presentations

Eric Sagnes gave an introductory NixOS talk in Japanese. The slides are here.
Maksim Bronsky presented Vulnix at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides (PDF download, DE only) are in the repository.
Lenko Donchev gave a lightning talk "NixOS the purely functional Linux distribution". The slides are available online.
John Wiegley gave a presentation "How I use nix for Haskell development" at the Bay Area Nix/NixOS User Group. Video available.

Meetups

Mar 24, 2017, Tokyo NixOS Meetup, Tokyo, Japan

My Japanese isn't good enough to figure out the speaker, but if you live in Japan you should go!
Mar 29, 2017, Munich NixOS Meetup at OpenLab Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

John Darrington will give a talk about guix and guixSD, a package manager and a Linux distribution which are based on similar concepts as nix/NixOS.

The talk will be in English.

Meetups that just happened

Feb 24--26, 2017, HackIllinois, University of Illinois, USA

For any university students in the US, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding a hackathon oriented towards getting people into open source development, and I'm going to be mentoring people for Nix/NixOS/Haskell development. Be sure to put "NixOS" or "Haskell" into your application somewhere.
Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mar 02, 2017, Bay Area Nix/NixOS User Group at Takt, San Francisco, USA

See the presentation about using Nix for Haskell development above.
Mar 12, 2017, London NixOS User Group at Smarkets, London, UK

Smarkets kindly offered us a space for our second community hackday!

There will be talking, pizzas and lots of packaging going on. Bring your own projects or just tag along and help other people out. Whether you have some software that you'd like to see packaged or questions about how everything fits together, there will be people available to help you.

Questions

Jobs

Looking for some Nix developers? Let us help you.

The Blue Brain Project recruit and is looking for someone with packaging, NixOS / Nix packaging knowledges and with a software engineering background. If any of you might be interested : http://emploi.epfl.ch/page-142376-en.html, The job is in Switzerland, Geneva, Swiss salary and Work visa granted for EU citizen if recruited.

Editor's corner

First time run for me to take care as the editor for an edition of [NixOS Weekly]{.title-ref}. It has been fantastic to see a few people spontaneously helping out to make it happen after a call for help from Rok.

Contributions are easy: Send a pull request to the repository or comment on the open issue for the next edition by providing a hint regarding a presentation, an event, a relevant change or discussion.

#03 - Better Late Than Never

NixOS — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Another two weeks have passed and it is time for our summary.

A new section Questions was added to the newsletter. The intention for this new section is that it is going to expose some of the questions that happen in the past. We hope that none of the questions will be left unanswered.

Sometimes we forget just how awesome Nix / NixOS is and we take its capabilities for granted. It is important that we remind ourself from time to time why are we using it, via reddit - In Love:

Just thought I'd share a compliment, switched from Arch, this thing is beautiful. Installing low level packages, configuration files, it all works so well.

Only issues are documentation (which I can see is being worked on and solved, albeit with limited manpower), and that some packages don't seem to work well with the package manager, but that's fixable over time.

But it's great for what it is, easy to get running, but still fully customization.

News

Important date: 27. Feb 2017 a branch-off for next NixOS release, 17.03 (Gorilla), is going to happen

This means you have few more days to land your change to nixpkgs master if you want them to be a part of Gorilla.

You can also follow the 17.03 milestone.
Assistance Required for Vulnerability Roundups

Since last newsletter 2 Vulnerability Roundup happen: 21, 22.

Graham Christensen is doing an amazing work coordinating the effort of a security team and also doing a big chunk of the work. Recently he asked for help and let us make sure he gets some helping hand, or two, three, ...

We can all recognize that The work the security team is doing is of a great importance, since that makes it possible for the rest community to use NixOS in more production environments.
At FOSDEM a very [spontaneous NixOS discussion panel happen]{.title-ref}. As a follow-up @zimbatm created an initial proposal for RFC.

Having a more formal proposal how we work together and how bigger changes are discussed is a step towards mature Linux distribution. Having NixOS already reached this state is an impressive achievement.
xorg-server major update
KDE4 removed in master
Haskell: master has switched to LTS 8.x with GHC 8.0.2
Python 3 as default (discussion).
Nixpkgs: Adding setcap-wrapper functionality
Nix: Add support for s3:// URIs
Feedback requested: Feedback on workshop material
Feedback requested: Better firewalling in NixOS
Feedback requested: "Monitoring" NixOS?
Release: vagrant-nixos-plugin released v0.2.1, now with --show-trace support.

Add basic nix configuration provisioning for NixOS guests in Vagrant.
Release: docker-nix-builder beta.

Did you ever have to battle with a user that only wants to have Docker installed on his system? Or a user that is developing on macOS and has broken nix packages?

docker-nix-builder is a tool to help smooth the transition. Instead of using nix to build the project, use Docker to run nix to build the project. At the end the users gets a new Docker container that only (mostly) contains the build result.
Release: Bundle Nix derivations to run anywhere, nix-bundle

nix-bundle is a way to package Nix attributes into single-file executables. Benefits: Single-file output, Can be run by non-root users, No runtime, Distro agnostic, Completely portable, No installation

Reading

Presentations

Last month's talk on Nix and NixOS from the Louisville Haskell Meetup.
Deploying NPM packages with the Nix package manager by Sander van der Burg.
NixOS - Les infrastructures immuables et la configuration déclarative by David Sferruzza

Meetups

Feb 24--26, 2017, HackIllinois, University of Illinois, USA

For any university students in the US, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding a hackathon oriented towards getting people into open source development, and I'm going to be mentoring people for Nix/NixOS/Haskell development. Be sure to put "NixOS" or "Haskell" into your application somewhere.
Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mar 22, 2017, Munich NixOS Meetup at OpenLab Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

John Darrington will give a talk about guix and guixSD, a package manager and a Linux distribution which are based on similar concepts as nix/NixOS.

The talk will be in English.

Meetups that just happened

Feb 18, 2017, Berlin NixOS Meetup at Schnee von morgen, Berlin, Germany
Feb 09, 2017, NixOS: Functional Packaging For The Win by Tobias Pflug at Wasserturm Stromeyersdorf, Konstanz, Germany

Questions

Jobs

Looking for some Nix developers? Let us help you.

Smarkets, London, United Kingdom

We are looking for Infra team lead and Infra engineer.

The jobs are not a Nix jobs per se since we are not using Nix at the moment. However, internally few of us are interested in trying it for e.g. building AMIs or provisioning docker containers with (mostly) python software. We think some strong candidate with experience of using Nix in production would have a good chance of seeing some adoption here.

Editor's corner

As you also probably noticed, this newsletter is coming out 2 days late. I am trying to get it out in time, but life happens also. If you would like to help release weekly newsletter please contact me.

#02 - Here we go

NixOS — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Let us together review what happened in NixOS community in last 2 weeks. We are always looking to improve.

Let us know how we can do better.

News

Many of you are not aware, but you can easily subscribe and help triage tickets and pull requests in NixOS/nixpkgs repository.
Branch-Off and Release Timeline for NixOS 17.03.
Hydra Building PRs discussion with a follow-up discussion. The service is merging with hydra.nixos.org.
Nixpkgs Overlays pull request proposed by Nicolas B. Pierron got merged (more discussion).

Meetups

Feb 18, 2017, Berlin NixOS Meetup at Schnee von morgen, Berlin, Germany
Feb 09, 2017, NixOS: Functional Packaging For The Win by Tobias Pflug at Wasserturm Stromeyersdorf, Konstanz, Germany

Some of you might have heard about NixOS and its very different approach to a package and configuration management. While I am certainly not an expert with Nix myself I did tinker with it for a bit and I think it's awesome. I would like to give you an idea of the concepts, possibilities and maybe spark some interest.
Feb 24--26, 2017, HackIllinois, University of Illinois, USA

For any university students in the US, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding a hackathon oriented towards getting people into open source development, and I'm going to be mentoring people for Nix/NixOS/Haskell development. Be sure to put "NixOS" or "Haskell" into your application somewhere.
Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Meetups that just happened

Feb 03, 2017, Nix and Beyond: Pure Functional Package Management at Louisville Haskell Meetup, Louisville, USA
Jan 24, 2017, London NixOS User Group at CodeNode, London, UK

Reading

Presentations

Nix at Mozilla (login required) by Rok Garbas
NYLUG Presents: Charles Strahan -on- Introduction to NixOS
Erlang Factory SF 2016: Erlang On NixOS - Managing And Releasing Erlang Systems In The Cloud With A Fully Declarative Package Manager presented by Eric Merritt

Jobs

Smarkets, London, United Kingdom

We are looking for Infra team lead and Infra engineer.

The jobs are not a Nix jobs per se since we are not using Nix at the moment. However, internally few of us are interested in trying it for e.g. building AMIs or provisioning docker containers with (mostly) python software. We think some strong candidate with experience of using Nix in production would have a good chance of seeing some adoption here.

Write us if you are looking for some Nix developers.

Editor's corner

Lately, I was thinking about the structure of this newsletter and noticed that it is quite advance Nix oriented. Would a section where we would promote questions from reddit / stack overflow be of any help to newcomers? Let me know.

#01 - We need to start somewhere

NixOS — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the first edition of NixOS weekly. We will do our best to release this newsletter every second week. If there is something you think we could improve, please let us know.

News

NixOS 17.03 release manager is Robin Gloster. Thank you and we are looking to help you get 17.03 out of the door.
Typing nix − funding campaign: Help Théophane Hufschmitt get his internship funded.

Meetups

Jan 24, 2017, London NixOS User Group at CodeNode, London, UK
Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Feb 18, 2017, Berlin NixOS Meetup at schnee von morgen, Berlin, Germany

Meetups that just happened:

Jan 19, 2017, Tokyo NixOS Meetup at Fujisan.co.jp, Tokyo, Japan
Jan 17, 2017, NixOS Dublin Meetup at Workday, Dublin, Ireland

Reading

Presentations

CRM053: NixOS (in German) by Franz Pletz
FrOSCon 2016: NixOS by Franz Pletz
ZuriHac 2016: Functional Programming at LumiGuide by Bas van Dijk

Jobs

Write us if you are looking for some Nix developers.

Editor's corner

Since this is first edition it is not perfect, but eventually we will get there. You can help us as well.

NixOS 16.09 released

NixOS — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 16.09 “Flounder” has been released, the sixth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.4 released

NixOS — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.4 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

NixOS 16.03 released

NixOS — Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 16.03 “Emu” has been released, the fifth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.11 released

NixOS — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.11 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 15.09 released

NixOS — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 15.09 “Dingo” has been released, the fourth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 15.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 15.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.10 released

NixOS — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.10 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixCon 2015

NixOS — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2015, the first Nix Conference, will take place on November 14—15th 2015 in Berlin. For more information, see the NixCon website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS Foundation

NixOS — Sun, 09 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The NixOS Foundation was started to improve our ability to maintain and extend the infrastructure used by the Nix related projects. If you would like to support us, please go here and donate some money!

Nix 1.9 released

NixOS — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.9 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 14.12 released

NixOS — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS 14.12 “Caterpillar” has been released, the third stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.14, systemd 217, Glibc 2.20, KDE 4.14.1, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.12 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 14.12, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.8 released

NixOS — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.8 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS sprint in Ljubljana

NixOS — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

We’re having a NixOS sprint at the Kiberpipa hackerspace in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on August 23—27. Joining is free! For more information and to register, please go to the sprint page.

NixOS 14.04 released

NixOS — Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:01 GMT

NixOS 14.04 “Baboon” has been released, the second stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.12, systemd 212, GCC 4.8, Glibc 2.19, KDE 4.12, light-weight NixOS containers, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.04 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade a 13.10 system to 14.04, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.2 released

NixOS — Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.2 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

Nix 1.7 released

NixOS — Sun, 11 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.7 has been released. See the release notes for a list of new features.

Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL

NixOS — Fri, 09 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL. All stable NixOS releases prior to version 13.10.35708.15a465c are vulnerable. (You can see your current version by running nixos-version.) To upgrade to the latest NixOS version, run nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade. You can verify whether you are safe by running

$ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl

If this shows any OpenSSL version prior to 1.0.1g, you may be vulnerable.

FOSDEM talks

NixOS — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Domen Kožar gave a talk at FOSDEM about NixOS (video). Also, Ludovic Courtès gave a talk on Guix, the Nix- and Guile-based package manager.

Stdenv updates branch merged into master

NixOS — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

The stdenv-updates branch has been merged into the master branch of Nixpkgs. The main change are that brings is that Nixpkgs/NixOS are now based on GCC 4.8 and Glibc 2.18, in addition to many smaller updates.

NixOS 13.10 released

NixOS — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

We have released NixOS 13.10, the first stable branch of NixOS. Its goal is to provide a safe branch for production environments that need bug fixes and security updates, but not the potentially destabilising changes that sometimes occur on the unstable branch. You can get NixOS 13.10 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. See the announcement for more information. For information on how to switch an existing NixOS machine from the unstable channel to 13.10, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.6.1 released

NixOS — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.6.1 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release but has some minor new features. See the release notes for details.

NixOS sources merged into Nixpkgs

NixOS — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The NixOS Git tree has been merged into the Nixpkgs tree in order to simplify development. The sources now live in the nixos subdirectory of the Nixpkgs repository on GitHub. See the announcement for more information.

NixOps 1.1.1 released

NixOS — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.1.1 has been released. This release consists mostly of minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

Nix 1.6 released

NixOS — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.6 has been released. See the release notes for details.

NixOps 1.1 released

NixOS — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.1 has been released. This release brings a backend for Hetzner, a German data center provider, support for EC2 spot instances and some minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

NixOS sprint in Slovenia

NixOS — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A sprint focused on NixOS and Kotti will be held 22-26 July 2013 in Lokve, Slovenia. It is organised by Termitnjak and sponsored by LogicBlox.

NixOps 1.0.1 released

NixOS — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.0.1 has been released, a minor bug fix release. See the manual for details.

NixOS presentation at EuroPython

NixOS — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Domen Kožar gave a presentation at EuroPython 2013: “NixOS Operating System: Declarative Configuration Distribution”.

NixOps 1.0 released

NixOS — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

NixOps 1.0 has been released, the inaugural release of the NixOS cloud deployment tool. See the announcement and the manual for details.

Nix 1.5.3 released

NixOS — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.5.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details.

PhD thesis: A Reference Architecture for Distributed Software Deployment

NixOS — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Today Sander van der Burg successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled A Reference Architecture for Distributed Software Deployment! It describes (among other things) Disnix, a system for deployment of service-oriented architectures.

Nix 1.5.2 released

NixOS — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.5.2 has been released. This is a bug fix release.

Nix 1.5.1 released

NixOS — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.5.1 has been released. It fixes a regression introduced in Nix 1.4. See the release notes for details.

Nix 1.4 released

NixOS — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.4 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release that addresses a security problem in multi-user mode. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

NixOS switched to systemd

NixOS — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS has switched from Upstart to systemd! Systemd brings many advantages such as better dependency management, socket-based activation of services, per-service logging, cgroup-based process management, and much more. (Read the announcement.)

Nix 1.3 released

NixOS — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.2 released

NixOS — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.2 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.1 released

NixOS — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 1.1 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Binary Nix tarballs available

NixOS — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Our continuous build system, Hydra, now produces binary tarball distributions of Nix for Mac OS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and Linux. The tarballs contain all dependencies of Nix, making it a lot easier to install Nix on those platforms. To install, download a binary tarball, unpack it in the root directory, then run nix-finish-install. See the manual for more information.

Nix 1.0 released

NixOS — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

After almost two years of development, Nix 1.0 has been released. See the release notes for an overview of the most important improvements. For installation information, see the manual.

PatchELF 0.6 released

NixOS — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

PatchELF 0.6 has been released. Apart from some bug fixes, it adds support for executables produced by the Gold linker. See the README for details.

Hydra talk at Inria

NixOS — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Ludovic Courtès gave a talk on Hydra at Inria (which has its own Hydra instance for building Inria software) entitled “Hydra: continuous integration for demanding people”.

Moving to GitHub

NixOS — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The NixOS project is (slowly) migrating from Subversion to Git! The master repositories will be hosted in the NixOS organization on GitHub. For the moment, just a few subprojects have been migrated, such as Hydra and Charon. Thanks to Tianyi Cui for donating the NixOS GitHub organization.

Nix-dev mailing list moved

NixOS — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The nix-dev mailing list has moved. The address is now nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl (web interface).

FOSDEM talk about NixOS

NixOS — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Sander van der Burg gave a talk about NixOS at the CrossDistro track of FOSDEM (video, slides).

ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing

NixOS — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:01 GMT

The paper “Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010). It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the environment (such as remote machines, network topologies, system services or root privileges) can be written succinctly using declarative specifications of the machines needed by the test environment. From these specifications we can automatically instantiate (networks of) virtual machines. This is what we use for automated regression testing of NixOS itself. A draft of the paper is available.

Xfce in NixOS

NixOS — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS now supports Xfce, a modern, light-weight desktop environment. It can be enabled by setting the NixOS configuration value services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable to true. (Screenshot)

Nix 0.16 released

NixOS — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.16 has been released, featuring a much faster evaluator and support for configurable parallelism inside builders. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

NixOS talk at LSM

NixOS — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Ludovic Courtès gave a talk about Nix and NixOS at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, entitled “NixOS: The Only Functional GNU/Linux Distribution” (slides).

Nix 0.15 released

NixOS — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 0.14 released

NixOS — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.14 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix logo

NixOS — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Long overdue, the Nix project finally has a logo! The logo was originally created by Simon Frankau for the Haskell logo competition, who kindly gave us permission to use it for the Nix project. (The snowflake motif is even more appropriate for Nix, because nix is Latin for snow.) Any further modifications are entirely our fault.

Nix 0.13 released

NixOS — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.13 has been released. This is mostly a bug fix release, although it also adds some new language features. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

LWN.net article on NixOS

NixOS — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

LWN.net has an article about NixOS written by Koen Vervloesem.

Nixpkgs 0.12 released

NixOS — Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Nixpkgs 0.12 has been released. See the release notes for details. Meanwhile, the Nixpkgs trunk has been updated to GCC 4.3.3, Glibc 2.9 and X.org 7.4.

OpenOffice.org 3 in Nixpkgs

NixOS — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Lluís Batlle has updated OpenOffice.org in Nixpkgs to 3.0.1 (screenshot).

KDE 4.2 in Nixpkgs/NixOS

NixOS — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We now have a fairly complete set of KDE 4.2 packages in Nixpkgs and NixOS. Previously we had KDE 3.5, but it was rather incomplete: just kdelibs and kdebase. Now we have all that desktop goodness, such as kdemultimedia, kdenetwork and kdegames. You can enable KDE 4 in NixOS by setting the services.xserver.sessionType option to kde4. Thanks go to Yury G. Kudryashov, Andrew Morsillo and Sander van der Burg for doing the hard work on adding KDE 4 to Nixpkgs. (Screenshot 1, screenshot 2)

Hydra

NixOS — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Nix and NixOS releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for a project are scheduled and published separately, so that for instance a (fast) tarball build doesn’t have to wait for a (slow) Cygwin build; build results are stored in a database, which will enable all sorts of interesting queries; better error reporting; a better web interface; and much more. We have written a draft paper about Hydra. There are some instructions available about how to set up your own Hydra server.

Linux.com article about Nix

NixOS — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There is an article on Linux.com about Nix: “Nix fixes dependency hell on all Linux distributions”.

Nix 0.12 released

NixOS — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.12 has been released. The most important change is that Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are many other improvements. See the release notes for details.

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp

NixOS — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s thesis research on DisNix, an extension to Nix that allows deployment and upgrading of distributed systems from a single declarative description. We will continue this research in the Jacquard PDS project, which has now started. (We still have an opening for a PhD student or a postdoc; please contact us if you’re interested.)

NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!

NixOS — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.

Website back up

NixOS — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat. These should be resolved now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Website / SVN repositories moved

NixOS — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The Nix website has moved to nixos.org (hosted at TU Delft). The Subversion repositories have moved to svn.nixos.org. See this mailing list posting for information about moving existing SVN working copies.

LDTA 2008 paper

NixOS — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Eelco Dolstra presented the paper “Maximal Laziness — An Efficient Interpretation Technique for Purely Functional DSLs” at 8th Workshop on Language Description, Tools and Applications (LDTA 2008). It’s about caching of evaluation results in the Nix expression evaluator as a technique to make a simple term-rewriting evaluator efficient. Slides are here.

Jacquard grant proposal accepted!

NixOS — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The Jacquard program of NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4 years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these positions, please have a look at this page, and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco Visser or Eelco Dolstra.

New NixOS ISOs

NixOS — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and x86_64 are available, which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a convenience, should support more SATA drives, and show online help (the NixOS manual) on virtual console 7.

Nix 0.11 released

NixOS — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.11 has been released. This is a major new release representing over a year of development. The most important improvement is secure multi-user support. It also features many usability enhancements and language extensions, many of them prompted by NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution based on Nix. See the release notes for details.

Nixpkgs 0.11 released

NixOS — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Nixpkgs 0.11 has been released. See the release notes for details.

OpenOffice in Nixpkgs

NixOS — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

OpenOffice is now in Nixpkgs (screenshot of OpenOffice 2.2.1 running under NixOS, and another screenshot). Despite being a rather gigantic package (it takes two hours to compile on an Intel Core 2 6700), OpenOffice had only two “impurities” (references to paths outside of the Nix store) in its build process that had to be resolved — a reference to /bin/bash and one to /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.

Armijn Hemel, Wouter den Breejen and Eelco Dolstra contributed to the Nix expression for OpenOffice.

NixOS progress report

NixOS — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Wine now runs on NixOS! Finally we can run all those legacy applications... Thanks to Michael Raskin for adding Wine and a NPTL-enabled Glibc (which Wine seems to need). This is a nice application of purely functional package composition, by the way: Wine didn’t work with the standard Glibc in Nixpkgs, so we just pass it another Glibc at build time.

In other news, Nix 0.11 and Nixpkgs 0.11 will be released soon.

Commits mailing list

NixOS — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

There is now a mailing list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit notifications from the Nix Subversion repository.

HotOS paper on NixOS

NixOS — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Eelco Dolstra presented the paper Purely Functional System Configuration Management at the 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XI). It gives an overview of the ideas behind NixOS. The slides are also available.

NixOS progress report

NixOS — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

We now have KDE running on NixOS (obligatory screenshot). Just kdebase for now (Martin Bravenboer already added kdelibs a long time ago so that we could run the wonderful KCachegrind), but it contains all the important stuff (Konqueror, KDesktop, Kicker, Konsole, Control Center, etc.).

In related news, we can safely say that, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, NixOS is not an April Fools’ Joke.

NixOS progress report

NixOS — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

NixOS is now almost usable as a desktop OS ;-). We have an X server, a bunch of Gnome packages, basic wireless support, and of course all the applications in Nixpkgs that we had all along running on other Linux distributions. Here are a few screenshots:

X server with Compiz window manager.
Emacs and a few terminals showing off the (near) absence of /lib, /bin etc.; everything is in the Nix store.
Some applications.

NixOS manual

NixOS — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

There is now some basic documentation for NixOS.

NixOS for x86_64

NixOS — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:01 GMT

NixOS now works on x86_64 machines. A 64-bit ISO is available.

New build farm hardware at TUD

NixOS — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

To quote Eelco Visser: new hardware for buildfarm at Delft University of Technology has arrived.

Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in power supply, a console with integrated monitor and keyboard switches, a rack with room for a couple more machines.

Here’s what we’re going to do with the goodies. The five Intel machines and the two MacMinis (also Intel) are going to be used to crank at building hundreds of software packages. Using virtualisation we should be able to run builds on multiple operating system distributions. Read more…

Nixpkgs 0.10 released

NixOS — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Nixpkgs 0.10 has been released. See the release notes for details.

Nix 0.10.1 released

NixOS — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that shouldn’t affect most users.

Nix 0.10 released

NixOS — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.10 has been released. This release has many improvements and bug fixes; see the release notes for details.

Nixpkgs 0.9 released

NixOS — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Nixpkgs 0.9 has been released.

PhD thesis defended

NixOS — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Eelco Dolstra defended his PhD thesis on the purely functional deployment model.

Nix 0.9.2 released

NixOS — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X.

Nix 0.9 released

NixOS — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Nix 0.9 has been released. This is a new major release that provides quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a number of new features. Read the release notes for details.

Secure sharing paper accepted for ASE 2005

NixOS — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The paper “Secure Sharing Between Untrusted Users in a Transparent Source/Binary Deployment Model” has been accepted at ASE 2005. This paper describes how a Nix store can be securely shared by multiple users who may not trust each other; i.e., how do we prevent one user from installing a Trojan horse that is subsequently executed by some other user?

Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12

NixOS — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the 12th International Workshop on Software Configuration Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy “services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our Subversion server) through Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configuration files, control scripts and static data) as components that are built by Nix expressions. The result is that all advantages that Nix offers to software deployment also extend to service deployment, such as the ability to easily have multiple configuration side by side, to roll back configurations, and to identify the precise dependencies of a configuration.

Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005

NixOS — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005. It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store. Includes techniques such as patch chaining and computing deltas between archive files.

Paper “Imposing a Memory Management Discipline on Software Deployment” accepted for presentation at ICSE 2004!

NixOS — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The first Nix paper.