Although Nix flakes are still marked as unstable, they became the de facto standard for managing reproducible NixOS system configurations. Regarding NixOS system configurations, the major benefit of flakes is that they bundle nixpkgs (and possibly further dependencies) along with the configuration files. The nixpkgs version and the configuration files Read more…
The other day I was working with fixed-output derivations. After copying several files to $out, I was facing a “Illegal path references in fixed-output derivation error”. The only helpful reference on the internet I could find was the Nix source code on GitHub. It took me a while to figure Read more…
The other day, I was about to add an attribute to pkgs.lib using a nixpkgs overlay. There is a small and subtle pitfall when doing so, which made me create this short blog post. A basic overlay looks like this: By looking at the architecture diagram, we see that both Read more…
Update 2024-04-10: Updated with my latest knowledge about this topic. In this blog post, I’m going to show you briefly how you can compile an out-of-tree Linux kernel module in Nix. I use regular Nix for that and no Nix flakes. However, with flakes, the approach is similar. Background Knowledge Read more…
In this blog post, I explain how to test a single NixOS module in CI. By single NixOS module, I mean a module that provides some options and configurations, but itself is not a valid NixOS configuration. The use case is to have a common module (in a git repository) Read more…