Nix at Mozilla
Jan 2017
London Nixos Usergroup
@garbas
What is Nix?
- a build tool
- a language
- a package manager
- extends to whole Linux distro
How to introduce Nix at work?
- Solve your own problem first (eg. your own development environment)
- Teach nix
- Start to package projects as you come by them
- Put infrastructure in place (Travis + S3 bucket is enough)
- Teach nix
- Volunteer to solve hard problems only Nix can solve
- Teach nix
- Point out problems (laud) which other tools are not considering
- Create default.nix for all your projects
- Time to create first PRs to share default.nix with others
- Talk with coworkers about Nix (to remove the fear)
- In worse case you can keep you default.nix and people will eventually look at it.
Solve your own problems first
Start to package other projects
- create an overlay repository (eg. nixpkgs-<company>)
- https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla
- https://garbas.si/2016/updating-your-nix-sources.html#extending-nixpkgs
- show that you coulud improve current situation of your tooling. best to do it is by example. eg. automatic security checks using vulnix (per project), automatic updating of sources/version
Put infrastructure in place
- This is needs to help the future growth. you want your coworkers to get binaries and not to compile.
- Travis + S3 bucket is all you need
- https://github.com/mozilla-releng/services/blob/master/.taskcluster.sh
- Do not use Hydra! It is not bad, but switching to many thing scares people. Be patient and move step by step.
Volunteer to solve hard problems
- Package old projects
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/21355
- Build reproducible docker images (no other tool can do this)
- Reproducibility as a productivity tool
- https://garbas.si/2016/reproducible-builds-summit-in-berlin.html
- Create Nix recipe for puppet/chef/ansible/... and when time comes (we need a X version which is not packaged for a distro) step in to solve it with nix
Teach Nix
- No idea how best to do it. There are no good resources. With attention that Nix is getting this should get fixed soon.
- Pair programming session, write down questions and make sure you document the answers.
- Nix + Python + Docker session: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d66PQmsFgJLn9Dck4e1d_2yvmIoDLUsws4vDMOh7RDA/edit?usp=sharing
- https://docs.mozilla-releng.net/prerequirements.html
Bonus: Updating sources
(coming soon to nixpkgs - partially is already in)
{ stdenv, ... }:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
name
src = fetchFromGithubWithUpdate {
owner = "gutschke";
repo = "pdf2odt";
branch = "master";
path = "pkgs/tools/typesetting/pdf2odt/src.json";
};
... or ...
src = fetchFromGitHub (stdenv.lib.importJSON ./src.json);
passthru.updateScript = updateFromGitHub {
owner = "gutschke";
repo = "pdf2odt";
branch = "master";
path = "pkgs/tools/typesetting/pdf2odt/src.json";
};
}
----
nix-shell maintainers/scripts/update.nix --argstr package pdf2odt
Bonus: NixOS weekly
Help shape next release (07.02.2017)
Bonus: Python + Nix
pypi2nix -r requirements.txt
nix-build -A requirements.nix -A interpreter
TODO: copy how pelican set was integrated in nixos-weekly
Thank you
@garbas
Nix at Mozilla
By Rok Garbas
Nix at Mozilla
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