[Nix-dev] Sharing Nix store between systems

[Tyson Whitehead]

On April 29, 2015 14:03:08 Tyson Whitehead wrote:
> I'm looking to setup a shared nix store for our HPC clusters.  Googling for a shared store only gives a brief discussion back at the end of 2011
> 
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2011-December/007381.html
> 
> My current plan of attack (informed by that thread) is to setup a sever (hereafter the "nix server") running the nix daemon that exports
> 
> - a read-only version of the store
> - a read/write version of the gcroots and profiles directories
> 
> Machines that mount the store and gcroots/profiles would then be set to forward the nix daemon socket to the nix server.

Got this working by the way on our HPC clusters.  Ended up

1 - adding socket code to remote-store.cc to initiate connections, and
2 - using systemd socket passing with nix-env to listen on a port

I've pushed a temporary branch to a github fork

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/compare/master...twhitehead:remote

I would like to get this officially supported, so my intent is to get some feedback before doing a pull request.

How would you like this to work?  Something enabled by configure?  Always supported out of the box?  Should I open an issue?

Thanks!  -Tyson