Move to Nix?

[paf31]

I've done some basic research on this, but it seems like it would involve quite a bit of work, and my Nix skills aren't yet up to it. I'd appreciate any help from anyone with the right knowledge.

[hdgarrood]

fwiw, the last time I looked at Nix (which admittedly was a while ago), my conclusion was that it seems like a great idea but is still very much in the "you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty / figure stuff out on your own" stage. For me personally, level of adoption — i.e. probability you'll be able to google a problem and find someone with pretty much the same problem — is the most important thing, which basically means I'm happiest using Ubuntu. That's just a suggestion though; obviously your perspective ought to be more important since you're doing most (almost all?) of the ops stuff.

[paf31]

I've had a very similar experience. I like the results I get from Nix, but I don't like the practice. The Nix language and its idioms seem clunky and it's very hard to find the functions I need.

For now, all I want is a simple way to bring up a replica of the system on a new machine, which doesn't need Nix, but Nix would definitely make it simpler.

The other thing Nix brings is the ability to easily deploy new services from PRs from contributors.

[joncfoo]

I'd be happy to help with nix-ifying the community server. Are the configs in this repo up to date?

[paf31]

They're not quite up to date, but they're basically correct. I can provide help if you'd like to try to get something running. Even Nixifying Pursuit and Try PS would be very very helpful.

The context for this issue is probably important - I wanted people to be able to send me PRs for the infrastructure itself, and then I'd be able to pull those changes and deploy. However, nobody has really expressed any need for that as a "feature" so maybe this is work that doesn't need to be done? I think using Nix would be interesting, and I do like the idea of people being able to replicate the server locally, but for the purposes of running the server as we use it now, it's not really necessary.

[hdgarrood]

We previously got most of the way towards nix-ifying Pursuit; the only remaining obstacle was that I wanted to keep using stack for choosing install plans, whereas Nix didn't seem to have a great way of doing that (at least, not at the time).

[joncfoo]

@hdgarrood continuing to build with stack in nix is very reasonable. I've started on the work here. If you'll note, I am building pursuit with stack. I've almost got most of trypurescript built as well.

In the next few days I should have a nix-ified container that is running pursuit and most of trypurescript running. My goal is to be able to build and deploy all the community services with a single nix configuration.

It'd be helpful if the slides backend was included in this repo and the latest flare backend. It appears that Sparkle was removed from the latest package-set and so I'm unable to build the flare backend locally.

[hdgarrood]

Looks great so far! I think the static files get embedded into the Pursuit binary during stack build, so you probably don't need to copy them around or configure their paths.