Nix Notes

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:44:58 -0500
debian, debian-planet, packaging, python-planet, review

Meta

In case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to post and one of the things that entails is to just dump over the fence a bunch of draft notes. In this specific case, I had a set of rough notes about NixOS and particularly Nix, the package manager.

In this case, you can see the very birth of an article, what it looks like before it becomes the questionable prose it is now, by looking at the Git history of this file, particularly its birth. I have a couple of those left, and it would be pretty easy to publish them as is, but I feel I'd be doing others (and myself! I write for my own documentation too after all) a disservice by not going the extra mile on those.

So here's the long version of my experiment with Nix.

Nix

A couple friends are real fans of Nix. Just like I work with Puppet a lot, they deploy and maintain servers (if not fleets of servers) with NixOS and its declarative package management system. Essentially, they use it as a configuration management system, which is pretty awesome.

That, however, is a bit too high of a bar for me. I rarely try new operating systems these days: I'm a Debian developer and it takes most of my time to keep that functional. I'm not going to go around messing with other systems as I know that would inevitably get me dragged down into contributing into yet another free software project. I'm mature now and know where to draw the line. Right?

So I'm just testing Nix, the package manager, on Debian, because I learned from my friend that nixpkgs is the largest package repository out there, a mind-boggling 100,000 at the time of writing (with 88% of packages up to date), compared to around 40,000 in Debian (or 72,000 if you count binary packages, with 72% up to date). I naively thought Debian was the largest, perhaps competing with Arch, and I was wrong: Arch is larger than Debian too.

What brought me there is I wanted to run Harper, a fast spell-checker written in Rust. The logic behind using Nix instead of just downloading the source and running it myself is that I delegate the work of supply-chain integrity checking to a distributor, a bit like you trust Debian developers like myself to package things in a sane way. I know this widens the attack surface to a third party of course, but the rationale is that I shift cryptographic verification to another stack than just "TLS + GitHub" (although that is somewhat still involved) that's linked with my current chain (Debian packages).

I have since then stopped using Harper for various reasons and also wrapped up my Nix experiment, but felt it worthwhile to jot down some observations on the project.

Hot take

Overall, Nix is hard to get into, with a complicated learning curve. I have found the documentation to be a bit confusing, since there are many ways to do certain things. I particularly tripped on "flakes" and, frankly, incomprehensible error reporting.

It didn't help that I tried to run nixpkgs on Debian which is technically possible, but you can tell that I'm not supposed to be doing this. My friend who reviewed this article expressed surprised at how easy this was, but then he only saw the finished result, not me tearing my hair out to make this actually work.

Nix on Debian primer

So here's how I got started. First I installed the nix binary package:

apt install nix-bin

Then I had to add myself to the right group and logout/log back in to get the rights to deploy Nix packages:

adduser anarcat nix-users

That wasn't easy to find, but is mentioned in the README.Debian file shipped with the Debian package.

Then, I didn't write this down, but the README.Debian file above mentions it, so I think I added a "channel" like this:

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable nixpkgs
nix-channel --update

And I likely installed the Harper package with:

nix-env --install harper

At this point, harper was installed in a ... profile? Not sure.

I had to add ~/.nix-profile/bin (a symlink to /nix/store/sympqw0zyybxqzz6fzhv03lyivqqrq92-harper-0.10.0/bin) to my $PATH environment for this to actually work.

Side notes on documentation

Those last two commands (nix-channel and nix-env) were hard to figure out, which is kind of amazing because you'd think a tutorial on Nix would feature something like this prominently. But three different tutorials failed to bring me up to that basic setup, even the README.Debian didn't spell that out clearly.

The tutorials all show me how to develop packages for Nix, not plainly how to install Nix software. This is presumably because "I'm doing it wrong": you shouldn't just "install a package", you should setup an environment declaratively and tell it what you want to do.

But here's the thing: I didn't want to "do the right thing". I just wanted to install Harper, and documentation failed to bring me to that basic "hello world" stage. Here's what one of the tutorials suggests as a first step, for example:

curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
nix-shell --packages cowsay lolcat
nix-collect-garbage

... which, when you follow through, leaves you with almost precisely nothing left installed (apart from Nix itself, setup with a nasty "curl pipe bash". So while that works in testing Nix, you're not much better off than when you started.

Rolling back everything

Now that I have stopped using Harper, I don't need Nix anymore, which I'm sure my Nix friends will be sad to read about. Don't worry, I have notes now, and can try again!

But still, I wanted to clear things out, so I did this, as root:

deluser anarcat nix-users
apt purge nix-bin
rm -rf /nix ~/.nix*

I think this cleared things out, but I'm not actually sure.

Side note on Nix drama

This blurb wouldn't be complete without a mention that the Nix community has been somewhat tainted by the behavior of its founder. I won't bother you too much with this; LWN covered it well in 2024, and made a followup article about spinoffs and forks that's worth reading as well.

I did want to say that everyone I have been in contact with in the Nix community was absolutely fantastic. So I am really sad that the behavior of a single individual can pollute a community in such a way.

As a leader, if you have all but one responsability, it's to behave properly for people around you. It's actually really, really hard to do that, because yes, it means you need to act differently than others and no, you just don't get to be upset at others like you would normally do with friends, because you're in a position of authority.

It's a lesson I'm still learning myself, to be fair. But at least I don't work with arms manufacturers or, if I would, I would be sure as hell to accept the nick (or nix?) on the chin when people would get upset, and try to make amends.

So long live the Nix people! I hope the community recovers from that dark moment, so far it seems like it will.

And thanks for helping me test Harper!