tools/nixery/index.html


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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Nixery</title>
    <style>
      body {
        margin: 40px auto;
        max-width: 650px;
        line-height: 1.6;
        font-size: 18px;
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      h1, h2, h3 {
        line-height: 1.2
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  <body>
    <header>
      <h1>Nixery</h1>
      <aside>ad-hoc container images - powered by <a href="https://nixos.org/nix/">Nix</a></aside>
    </header>
    <h3>What is this?</h3>
    <p>
      Nixery provides the ability to pull ad-hoc container images from a Docker-compatible registry
      server. The image names specify the contents the image should contain, which are then
      retrieved and built by the Nix package manager.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nix is also responsible for the creation of the container images themselves. To do this it
      uses an interesting layering strategy described in
      <a href="https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images">this blog post</a>.
    </p>
    <h3>How does it work?</h3>
    <p>
      Simply point your local Docker installation (or other compatible registry client) at Nixery
      and ask for an image with the contents you desire. Image contents are path separated in the
      name, so for example if you needed an image that contains a shell and <code>emacs</code> you
      could pull it as such:
    </p>
    <p>
      <code>nixery.appspot.com/shell/emacs25-nox</code>
    </p>
    <p>
      Image tags are currently <i>ignored</i>. Every package name needs to correspond to a key in the
      <a href="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix">nixpkgs package set</a>.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are some special <i>meta-packages</i> which you <strong>must</strong> specify as the
      first package in an image. These are:
    </p>
    <ul>
      <li><code>shell</code>: Provides default packages you would expect in an interactive environment</li>
      <li><code>builder</code>: Provides the above as well as Nix's standard build environment</li>
    </ul>
    <p>
      Hence if you needed an interactive image with, for example, <code>htop</code> installed you
      could run <code>docker run -ti nixery.appspot.com/shell/htop bash</code>.
    </p>
    <h3>FAQ</h3>
    <p>
      Technically speaking none of these are frequently-asked questions (because no questions have
      been asked so far), but I'm going to take a guess at a few anyways:
    </p>
    <ul>
      <li>
        <strong>Where is the source code for this?</strong>
        <br>
        Not yet public, sorry. Check back later(tm).
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Which revision of <code>nixpkgs</code> is used?</strong>
        <br>
        Currently whatever was <code>HEAD</code> at the time I deployed this. One idea I've had is
        to let users specify tags on images that correspond to commits in nixpkgs, however there is
        some potential for abuse there (e.g. by triggering lots of builds on commits that have
        broken Hydra builds) and I don't want to deal with that yet.
      </li>
      <li>
        <strong>Who made this?</strong>
        <br>
        <a href="https://twitter.com/tazjin">@tazjin</a>
      </li>
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>