Nix Docker Utils

Experiments in containers

Nix In Docker Builder

Start Nix in a Docker container such that it can serve as a remote builder.

source $(nix build github:tomberek/nix-runner#builderScript --print-out-paths)

Container built by Nix

With some niceties like pre-loaded and pinned nixpkgs, tab-completion, and cached searching.

nix build
docker load < ./result
docker run --rm -it docker.io/tomberek/nix-runner:pure-nix

Custom image build with a Dockerfile

make -C dockerfile-root/
docker run --rm -it docker.io/tomberek/nix-runner:pure-docker

Container built by BuildKit-Nix

Using BuildKit-Nix

• broken at the moment

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t docker.io/tomberek/nix-runner:buildkit-nix -f flake.nix .
docker run --rm -it kit-nix

Random

nix store gc --option keep-derivations false && nix path-info --all -sSh | sort -hk2

Why use this?

If you want to use Nix, but don't want to build a container using Nix tooling, these are minimal containers that can fetch everything it needs during runtime given the proper environment variables and access to the correct binary caches. Updating the environment variables and bouncing the containers makes for quick and easy update of services.

References

Some ideas from https://github.com/teamniteo/nix-docker-base/blob/master/image.nix