Packaging This Blog with Nix

March 2, 2016

As a learning experience, I decided I wanted to try to package this blog using nix. It seemed like it should be a simple enough task, and a good way to get started with packaging my personal projects.

Creating a Local Repo

Most of the packaging guides for nix start with the assumption you intend to upstream your work to nixpkgs ASAP by working in a fork of the nixpkgs repo. I wanted a way to package my code that would:

  1. Allow me to reliably rebuild it without network access (beyond the initial fetch)
  2. Keep package files closely tied to the repositories they sit in
  3. Eventually upstream it without changing the package’s default.nix file
  4. Be easy to maintain in the future

My personal projects are all held in a Projects directory with this rough structure:

~/Projects
├── blog
│   ├── default.nix
│   └── ...
└── other-project
    ├── default.nix
    └── ...

Taking advantage of this regular structure, I settled on the following expression

# default to a local build
{isLocal ? true}:

let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
    overrideDerivation = pkgs.stdenv.lib.overrideDerivation;
    localSourceRoot = /home/adjective/Projects;

    # if we are building from local source (development)
    # override the src property of the derivation
    # otherwise, leave it untouched
    overrideIfLocal = (localPath: old:
      let srcModification = (_ :if isLocal 
          then { src = localPath; }
          else {}
      );
      in overrideDerivation old srcModification 
    );

    # load a package and override it if we are
    # doing a local build
    loadPackage = (localPath:
      overrideIfLocal 
        localPath 
        (pkgs.callPackage ("${localPath}/default.nix") {})
    );

# list of projects that have been packaged so far
in with pkgs;
{
  blog = loadPackage ./blog;
}

this can be used to build any project as either a local or a networked build with the command

nix-env -f root.nix -i $project --arg isLocal true
nix-env -f root.nix -i $project --arg isLocal false

Packaging the Blog

I already had a shell.nix file, so I the dependency resolution part of the packaging process was already done for me. Neat!

However, the peculiar way nix builds things to get reproducible outputs introduced some interesting issues.

Hakyll, UTF-8, and locale

In order to handle utf-8 character encodings, hakyll site binaries require the user set a utf-8 compatible locale (e.g. en_US-UTF8.

I’m unfamiliar with how locale actually works in Linux. Normally I just set it once when I install and forget about it. Apparently there’s a series of Perl scripts that manage your language settings for time formats, keyboard layout, etc. Some part of the mechanism requires a locale store, which is provided as a part of glibc.

To get around this, we can add a dependency on glibc and point to the locale-archive before the site is built.

  configurePhase = ''
    export LOCALE_ARCHIVE=${glibcLocales}/lib/locale/locale-archive
    export LANG=${buildLocale}
  '';

Deploying with Git

I pulled heavily on this example for auto-deploying with travis-ci for automatically deploying built sites to a gh-pages branch.

  mkdir $out
  mv _site/* $out
  cd $out

  git init
  git config user.email "nix-autobuild@huang-hobbs.co"
  git config user.name "nix-autobuild"
  git config http.sslVerify false
  git add * > /dev/null
  git commit -am "Nix-build at `time`"

  git push --force --quiet \
    https://${github_token}@${github_remote} master:gh-pages > /dev/null

github_remote and github_token are values set in a let binding at the head of the page, and is loaded on evaluation from a file github_secret in the same folder.

End Notes

I’m pretty pleased with the end result, all things considered. Nix is proving to be pretty powerful, if a little difficult to pick up.

Future Work

Thanks

I probably would have given up on this pretty quickly if not for the help of the people who hang out in the #nixos freenode irc channel.

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