I've started building my own home media center, and I thought it would be a good idea to learn something new and try to make it reproducible, thus I thought of nix for this. Nix is an operating system (which we won't care now), a language (also don't care for now), and a package manager. We are gonna focus on the package manager part alone, which is already a lot for my brain. This package manager works on mac and linux, and it already has many packages available (bye bye interop problems between mac/linux?)

The first thing I needed for my raspberry pi was to create a PSK password using wpa_password, and I tried to run it inside a nix shell on my mac, which didn't work, because wpa_password doesn't run on a mac. This was a good opportunity to write something fast, and to make it reusable and reproducible from any unix OS using nix.

Objectives

1. Create a nix package for wpa_password (a nix flake)
2. Use wpa_password in my home-media project. I want to jump into a shell with the wpa_password from any unix os, mac or linux (freebsd at some point?)

Creating a nix package

I ended up writing the utility in rust, which took me a bunch of hours, the repo wpa_passphrase_rs contains the project finalized.

After a lot of reading, and wrapping my mind around nix, which I had 0 knowledge before, everything points out that flakes are the new kid in town, and that's what I should use in my project.

I have a take on nix status, which may need corroboration: nix is moving away from the old way to the new (flakes) way, and there are many outdated posts, and commands. Many commands that fit the pattern nix-* are no longer used, and instead people now use the new nix <command> instead. For example, things like nix-shell are not used much anymore.

Going back to the nix flake, If you have installed nix, flakes must be enabled, because it's an experimental feature.

For mac (which only supports multiuser installation):

echo 'experimental-features = nix-command flakes' >> /etc/nix/nix.conf
# you may use ~/.config/nix/nix.conf on linux

What are flakes?

According to nix's wiki:

Flakes allow you to specify your code's dependencies (e.g. remote Git repositories) in a declarative way, simply by listing them inside a flake.nix file. Each dependency gets pinned, that is: its commit hash gets automatically stored into a file - named flake.lock - making it easy to, upgrade it Flakes replace the nix-channels command and things like ad-hoc invocations of builtins.fetchgit - no more worrying about keeping your channels in sync, no more worrying about forgetting about a dependency deep down in your tree: everything's at hand right inside flake.lock.

Seems like we are gonna need two files: flake.nix and flake.lock.

The next step is to create the flake from a template. What available templates do we have? I wonder...

nix flake show templates

github:NixOS/templates/2d6dcce2f3898090c8eda16a16abdff8a80e8ebf
├───defaultTemplate: template: A very basic flake
└───templates
    ├───bash-hello: template: An over-engineered Hello World in bash
    ├───c-hello: template: An over-engineered Hello World in C
    ├───compat: template: A default.nix and shell.nix for backward compatibility with Nix installations that don't support flakes
    ├───full: template: A template that shows all standard flake outputs
    ├───go-hello: template: A simple Go package
    ├───haskell-hello: template: A Hello World in Haskell with one dependency
    ├───haskell-nix: template: An haskell.nix template using hix
    ├───hercules-ci: template: An example for Hercules-CI, containing only the necessary attributes for adding to your project.
    ├───pandoc-xelatex: template: A report built with Pandoc, XeLaTex and a custom font
    ├───python: template: Python template, using poetry2nix
    ├───rust: template: Rust template, using Naersk
    ├───rust-web-server: template: A Rust web server including a NixOS module
    ├───simpleContainer: template: A NixOS container running apache-httpd
    └───trivial: template: A very basic flake

Fantastic! Look at that! There's a python version and even a rust web server. The one I need is the rust template, let's use that one as a base.

nix flake init -t templates#rust

And that was it, it worked. This is going well. I can create a binary inside ./result/bin by running

nix build

or use it by running

nix run

My mind is blown at this point 🤯

Using the flake somewhere else

I couldn't find much about this, as I said, there's a mix of old and new information. I think it clicked for me, when I realized that the nix command is new, and it's integration with flakes goes to its core (am I correct on this?).

Using the flake becomes straightforward.

nix shell 'github:woile/wpa_passphrase_rs'

And wpa_password will appear on my PATH.

wpa_password --help

And we can exit with a CTRL + D.

What's next?

What's the right way to make it declarative? I want to have a file with the dependencies required for my home media project, and I'd like to jump into a shell with everything present.

Is there a different strategy for this?

How to use NixOps to provision all my raspberries and any other machine that joins the fleet?

This comparison between Ubuntu and Nix appears to be useful, I should read as well.

Please let me know in the comments section below or tag me on hachyderm @woile

Thanks for reading