Add a section on nix-serve

3 files changed, 72 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/doc/manual/packages/binary-cache-substituter.xml b/doc/manual/packages/binary-cache-substituter.xml
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..c6ceb9c80610
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/manual/packages/binary-cache-substituter.xml
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
+         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
+         xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
+         version="5.0"
+         xml:id="ssec-binary-cache-substituter">
+
+<title>Serving a Nix store via HTTP</title>
+
+<para>You can easily share the Nix store of a machine via HTTP. This
+allows other machines to fetch store paths from that machine to speed
+up installations. It uses the same <emphasis>binary cache</emphasis>
+mechanism that Nix usually uses to fetch pre-built binaries from
+<uri>https://cache.nixos.org</uri>.</para>
+
+<para>The daemon that handles binary cache requests via HTTP,
+<command>nix-serve</command>, is not part of the Nix distribution, but
+you can install it from Nixpkgs:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -i nix-serve
+</screen>
+
+You can then start the server, listening for HTTP connections on
+whatever port you like:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-serve -p 8080
+</screen>
+
+To check whether it works, try the following on the client:
+
+<screen>
+$ curl http://avalon:8080/nix-cache-info
+</screen>
+
+which should print something like:
+
+<screen>
+StoreDir: /nix/store
+WantMassQuery: 1
+Priority: 30
+</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+<para>On the client side, you can tell Nix to use your binary cache
+using <option>--option extra-binary-caches</option>, e.g.:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -i firefox --option extra-binary-caches http://avalon:8080/
+</screen>
+
+The option <option>extra-binary-caches</option> tells Nix to use this
+binary cache in addition to your default caches, such as
+<uri>https://cache.nixos.org</uri>. Thus, for any path in the closure
+of Firefox, Nix will first check if the path is available on the
+server <literal>avalon</literal> or another binary caches. If not, it
+will fall back to building from source.</para>
+
+<para>You can also tell Nix to always use your binary cache by adding
+a line to the <filename linkend="sec-conf-file">nix.conf</filename>
+configuration file like this:
+
+<programlisting>
+binary-caches = http://avalon:8080/ https://cache.nixos.org/
+</programlisting>
+
+</para>
+
+</section>
diff --git a/doc/manual/packages/copy-closure.xml b/doc/manual/packages/copy-closure.xml
index 5ec7896d8139..012030e3eb67 100644
--- a/doc/manual/packages/copy-closure.xml
+++ b/doc/manual/packages/copy-closure.xml
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
          version="5.0"
          xml:id="ssec-copy-closure">
 
-<title>Copying Closures</title>
+<title>Copying Closures Via SSH</title>
 
 <para>The command <command
 linkend="sec-nix-copy-closure">nix-copy-closure</command> copies a Nix
diff --git a/doc/manual/packages/sharing-packages.xml b/doc/manual/packages/sharing-packages.xml
index 586363b03a3c..8465c182ee72 100644
--- a/doc/manual/packages/sharing-packages.xml
+++ b/doc/manual/packages/sharing-packages.xml
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ another machine already has some or all of those packages or their
 dependencies.  In that case there are mechanisms to quickly copy
 packages between machines.</para>
 
+<xi:include href="binary-cache-substituter.xml" />
 <xi:include href="copy-closure.xml" />
 <xi:include href="ssh-substituter.xml" />