A lightning talk I gave at May Contain Hackers 2022, prepared overnight after a beer.

I agree that dockerfile’s are not very reproducible. But honestly, that’s not how most people use it. I believe most people just pull the already built image which is very reproducible. Anyways, I found this video interesting and thought I’d share it and get your guys thoughts.

  • SciPiTie English
    1•11 months ago

    Thanks for the link and tips! Do you have something similar specific to flakes? The basic concepts seem straight forward and actually chatgpt was of great help so far - but I can’t get the feet on the ground with these fancy new packages :D

    • Nate CoxEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      I learned to use them by looking at repos online that came with a flake.nix.

      Also there’s this blog article that was helpful getting started: https://tonyfinn.com/blog/nix-from-first-principles-flake-edition/nix-7-what-about-flakes-then/

      Flakes aren’t much different from regular nix configs, except that they explicitly declare their sources by url. Rather than using whatever “home-manager” your system has on it, the flake says “go get home-manager from this location and use it”.

      The extra level of control makes for more reproducible configs by isolating dependencies from the system paths. At least in theory.