[Nix-dev] Some beginner Nix/nixpkgs questions

[Colin Putney]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 4:53 AM, Alex Dean <alex at snowplowanalytics.com>
wrote:


> On reproducible deployments using git revisions - it solves the problem,
> but it feels like a very "out-of-band" solution.
>

You don't have to embed a git revision in your nix expressions; I don't
like that solution much either. What we do at BetterCompany is always refer
to nixpkgs by an expression like import <nixpkgs> {}.  Then we have
$NIX_PATH include nixpkgs=~/.nix-defexpr/channels/nixpkgs. That means we
can manage our version of nixpkgs using nix-channel.

More generally, we include a default.nix and shell.nix in the root
directory of all our repositories, and then have another repository similar
to nixpkgs that bundles everything up, provides library functions etc.
That's also in $NIX_PATH, so we can use import <ourpkgs> {} to get access
to cross-repository dependencies, custom derivations functions etc.

Finally, we tie it all together with Hydra, Nixops and a bit of custom code
to help with deployments.

Hope this helps, and I'm happy to go into more detail if you have specific
questions.

Colin
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