Serving a Nix store via HTTPYou 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 binary cache
mechanism that Nix usually uses to fetch pre-built binaries from
https://cache.nixos.org.The daemon that handles binary cache requests via HTTP,
nix-serve, is not part of the Nix distribution, but
you can install it from Nixpkgs:
$ nix-env -i nix-serve
You can then start the server, listening for HTTP connections on
whatever port you like:
$ nix-serve -p 8080
To check whether it works, try the following on the client:
$ curl http://avalon:8080/nix-cache-info
which should print something like:
StoreDir: /nix/store
WantMassQuery: 1
Priority: 30
On the client side, you can tell Nix to use your binary cache
using , e.g.:
$ nix-env -i firefox --option extra-binary-caches http://avalon:8080/
The option tells Nix to use this
binary cache in addition to your default caches, such as
https://cache.nixos.org. Thus, for any path in the closure
of Firefox, Nix will first check if the path is available on the
server avalon or another binary caches. If not, it
will fall back to building from source.You can also tell Nix to always use your binary cache by adding
a line to the nix.conf
configuration file like this:
binary-caches = http://avalon:8080/ https://cache.nixos.org/