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.
Build kite
NixOS comes with a module to run build-kite agents:
{
services.buildkite-agents.builder = {
enable = true;
# store a token provided in the buildkite webinterface in the `Agents` tab under `Agents token`
tokenPath = "/path/to/token";
privateSshKeyPath = "/path/to/ssh/key;
};
}