[Nix-dev] Nix for internal projects and monorepos

[Daniel Peebles]

Hi all,

I've been ruminating about the best way to deal with an internal (to a
company or otherwise private) package set with Nix, especially with a
monorepo.

My first inclination would be to leave Nix expressions (as default.nix)
alongside the project source code, and use path references in those
expressions (e.g., src = ./.;) to actually build the project.

The difficulty arises when you want to deploy this stuff to production.
Unless you want to ship your entire internal source tree to each box with
Nix on it (no, I don't in practice want to be building my apps in
production, and would use a Hydra/binary cache), you're going to want to
"lift out" the nix hierarchy from your source code hierarchy, replace the
src links with fixed-output derivations somehow, and ship the whole thing
as a channel. I don't know of any tooling to do that, or how to do that
effectively. It seems like it would require some tooling on the Nix side to
work nicely.

The alternative would be to adopt a more nixpkgs-like approach, and
maintain a separate tree of packages that point into fixed-output
references into the actual codebase. That unfortunately means moving the
build spec farther away from the code it builds, and although it might be
necessary in the case of nixpkgs (because we don't control all FOSS
projects), it seems like we can do better.

How do other people tackle this problem? Does anyone maintain a reasonably
large internal Nix package set?

Thanks,
Dan
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