[Nix-dev] Simplify node packages?

[William Casarin]

Benno Fünfstück <benno.fuenfstueck at gmail.com> writes:

> * A simple approach to packaging NPM applications would be to split the
> package for an NPM application into two:
>   - fetch: let NPM download all the dependencies. it should(?) be possible
> to make this a fixed-output derivation, as long as NPM downloads the same
> set of dependencies each time

AFAIK npm isn't deterministic, so this wouldn't be a good idea.

> The fetch phase should be deterministic if we freeze the NPM index (is such
> a thing possible?) and use shrinkwrap.
> Or is this not the case? In what cases will it fail to be deterministic?

This is effectively what node2nix[1] does, which is the most reliable
mechanism for deterministic node packages. It looks like this:

  https://github.com/jb55/npm-repo-proxy/blob/81182f25cb783a986d7b7ee4a63f0ca6ca9c8989/node-packages.nix

and then I use it like so:

  https://github.com/jb55/nix-files/blob/1c33031e5678c732dad3f0c76131a4575b7e7bd4/machines/charon/default.nix#L11-L16

It has been working great for my node servers. I haven't had much luck
with the nixpkgs nodejs machinery.


Cheers,


[1] https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix

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