[Nix-dev] Dynamic Nix Expression Configuration

[Roger Qiu]

Hello everybody,

What's the best way to send configuration parameters to Nix expressions?

Say I have a tool (a bash script) that dynamically generates nix 
expressions based on other runtime factors.

I can use the sed tool to find/replace some properties inside the 
`x.nix` files. But this can become a mess of unmaintainable regular 
expressions.

I would prefer to be able to instead write a config file with a standard 
schema, and then get Nix to import this, rather than using regular 
expressions.

This could be JSON. But it could also just a be a file with a list 
inside it.

I looked at the Nix Manual and found a few "builtins" functions. None of 
them seemed to be able to parse config or even a simple list in a static 
file.

I saw there was a toJSON and toXML, why not fromXML or fromJSON, or even 
just fromFileList or some functions that can parse text.

Barring that, perhaps is there a Nix expression parser that can be 
dynamically used?

Thanks,
Roger

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