Continuous Integration (CI)

Nix nicely integrates into your CI.

TODO: some general tips & tricks

Avoid downloading already built results

nix-build will always ensure the built store path is put in the local store, be it by building or by downloading from a substituter. On CI, we often only want to check whether we can build the derivation, without using or running the output.

This can be achieved by using `--dry-run` to check whether the result would be fetched, and only building it it has to be built.

nix-build-if-changed.py implements this in a relatively straightforward (but naïve) Python script.

nix-build-uncached implements it in a slightly more elaborate manner, and is available on nixpkgs (as the nix-build-uncached package).

Instructions for specific CI Providers

Travis CI

See Nix_on_Travis article

Github actions

See install-nix-action to install nix in Linux/macOS actions. There is also one action to setup cachix, a hosted binary cache.

Self-hosted runners

NixOS has a module for running self-hosted GitHub runners. Srid has an example usage.

Build kite

See the Buildkite article

Drone

There is no official NixOS module however both drone and drone-cli are packaged in nixpkgs.

Mic92 has the following custom module in his repository. An example public project can be found in cntr and this project for an example using flakes Mic92's dotfiles.

Jenkins

Jenkins

Gitlab

NixOS has a module for Gitlab runner

Garnix

Garnix is a nix-specific CI provider that also provides a cache. it currently only works with flake-enabled repos.

Sourcehut

Sourcehut provides an official NixOS image