pants-nix

Nix packages for pants build system.

⚠️ The package interface is in the alpha stage and can change.

Nuances

Official pants launcher can read [GLOBAL].pants_version from pants.toml, download the correct version of pants and run it. On the contrary, this nix package only provides the specific versions of pants, you need to use the correct version yourself.

Pants can download other tools via backends. This installation is reproducable by design, but binary packages like ruff probably won't work on nixos. To make them work we need some mechanism to tell pants to use preinstalled package from nix store.

Classic nix

Add channel:

nix-channel --add https://github.com/grihabor/pants-nix/archive/main.tar.gz pants-nix
nix-channel --update

Then build the package:

nix-build '<pants-nix>' -A '"release_2.20.0"'

Or install via nix-env:

nix-env -iA 'pants-nix."release_2.20.0"'

Docker container

Spin up a container:

docker run -it -e NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=channel:nixos-23.11 nixpkgs/nix:nixos-23.11 bash

Then inside the container:

nix-channel --add https://github.com/grihabor/pants-nix/archive/main.tar.gz pants-nix
nix-channel --update
nix-env -iA 'pants-nix."release_2.20.0"'
export PATH="$PATH:$(nix-env --query --out-path --no-name pants)/bin"
touch pants.toml
pants --version

Nix flakes

Adhoc shell:

nix shell 'github:grihabor/pants-nix#"release_2.20.0"' --command pants --version

Using in a flake:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    pants-nix = {
      url = "github:grihabor/pants-nix/main";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = {
    self,
    nixpkgs,
    pants-nix,
  }: let
    system = "x86_64-linux";
    pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
  in {
    devShells."x86_64-linux".default = pkgs.mkShell {
      packages = [
        pants-nix.packages."x86_64-linux"."release_2.21.0"
      ];
    };
  };
}

List available packages:

nix search github:grihabor/pants-nix ^

Development

nix-build -A '"release_2.20.0"'

nix build '.#"release_2.20.0"'

nix shell '.#"release_2.20.0"' --command pants --version