Nix

In a previous Nix post I mentioned how you can run once-off commands with Nix without polluting your system environment. First, the why. My community group hosts regular townhall meetings that I often can’t attend in person. Fortunately, recordings get posted to Vimeo afterwards. Rather than watching hour-long videos, I wanted a faster way to stay informed - hence this workflow. In this post, I want to demonstrate how you can extract audio from a Vimeo video, transcribe it to text, and generate a summary - all using nix run. ...

In a previous Nix post I mentioned how you can run once-off commands with Nix without polluting your system environment. In this post, I want to demonstrate how you can create self-contained and reproducible scripts using the Nix shebang. Simple cowsay script Using the interactive nix-shell To start, imagine a scenario where you want a cow to “moo” using cowsay. The bash script moo.sh would contain. #!/usr/bin/env bash cowsay "moo" To obtain the cowsay binary without polluting your system environment you would first generate a temporary environment. ...

An attempt at finding a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop on macOS. Why a replacement? Docker Desktop has been the gold standard for building and running containers on macOS. But what is it? Is it just a fancy container GUI? Well, no. The single, downloadable package comes built-in with everything you need to build and run Docker images on your machine. Besides running a VM in the background as a daemon, Docker Desktop provides seamless plumbing into the host machine with sane and secure defaults 1. ...

No need to pollute your system environment In the last post we discussed why it might not be wise to pollute your system (or global) environment by installing programs you’ll only run once. Often, these programs are installed and then forgotten about causing unnecessary bloat. A pristine system is easily maintained. When to use nix-shell or nix run We also showed in the last post how we could use nix-shell to temporarily bring programs into our path. This is still a viable option for running a once off command. ...

Why have project specific packages? There are a few reasons why you would want to have project specific packages. Different package versions per project e.g. you are maintaining a project that uses an old version of Node.js (like this blog, I’m lazy), but use a newer version globally on your system. You don’t want to pollute your global environment with packages you’ll only use in an isolated project e.g. nixfmt to format *.nix files in my dotfiles. Easy on-boarding of a new team member e.g. packages are declared in the same project and it is easy to install and start contributing (more details coming below). In the Nix ecosystem, this can be achieved using nix-shell. ...