[Nix-dev] Some beginner Nix/nixpkgs questions

[Alex Dean]

Hi,

I’m currently evaluating Nix (the package manager) for use at Snowplow - I
really like what I see but I have some questions, particularly around
private artifacts and package repositories.

As a bit of background, our primary goal in adopting Nix would be to move a
lot of bespoke app/data installation logic currently in Ansible into Nix.

Questions as follows:

1. I am a little confused by the role of Nixpkgs. If we take e.g.:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/servers/apache-kafka

Nixpkgs seems to offer only a single version of Kafka. What if I want to
install other versions of Kafka? It feels like the hierarchy is Nixpkgs ->
package-some-version, rather than Nixpkgs -> package -> version. What am I
missing?

2. Is there a way to fetchurl with authentication? I’m looking to reproduce
this (Ansible):

- name: Install {{ binary }} | Download {{ binary }} into staging directory
  get_url: url="{{ binaries[binary]['download_url'] }}/{{
binaries[binary]['download_file_name'] }}"
           dest={{ download_location }}
           url_username={{ bintray_username }}
           url_password={{ bintray_api_key }}
  sudo: yes

3. How do I operate a private repository of packages? I’ve seen this blog
post:

http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/managing-private-nix-packages-outside.html

But this seems to refer to private packages on the local filesystem. How do
I run a centralized but private repository of packages that 100s of
machines can download from?

Thanks - apologies if any of these questions are obvious or off-base; I
look forward to the community’s thoughts.

Alex

-- 
Co-founder
Snowplow Analytics <http://snowplowanalytics.com/>
The Roma Building, 32-38 Scrutton Street, London EC2A 4RQ, United Kingdom
+44 (0)203 589 6116
@alexcrdean <https://twitter.com/alexcrdean>
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