This folder (along with the top level flake.nix) contains Nix configurations to enable this project to be built by nix. These configurations are mostly wrappers around Makefile goals. The goal of this work is to enable people who use nix to integrate this project more easily in their workflows. It is not the goal of this work to replace the Makefile, and any Nix configurations added should wrap Makefile goals whenever possible so binaries built with nix will be identical to those built without.

Nix is a package manager that can aide in reproducible builds.

Using nix with this repository is entirely optional. You are welcome to just use the Makefile and maintain versions of dependent binaries in your own way.

Nix ships with commands such as nix build which will run our build (as defined in the Makefile) in a shell where the $PATH has been configured to have the specified version of all dependent binaries required to build and test our software (ie. go, golangci-lint, jq, jsonnet, etc), and put the resulting binary in a result folder. It also has a command nix develop which will dump you into a bash shell with a similarly configured $PATH.

So, for example, if the CI lint job fails, but it's passing locally, you could run the following to make sure it's not a problem with the version of the linter installed locally on you machine:

From the root of the repo:

nix develop
make lint

To build the repo (including running tests), from the root of the repo you can run nix build.

Nix is supported on Linux, MacOS, and Windows (WSL2). Check here for installation instructions for your specific platform.

You will also need to enable the Flakes feature to use Nix with this repo. See this wiki for instructions on enabling Flakes.