What Is Nix? - Hackdot

Re:What Is Nix? by tomberek on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @09:36PM (#23254023)

Interestingly, sshd WILL magically know to look at /nix/store/efgh5678-my-sshd-config-2.0/etc/ssh_config. Usually you would use sshd as a systemd service (possible to do and manage with Nix in Ubuntu, but why would you?). If so, you would write the systemd configuration using Nix and the service file deployed to NixOS (or Ubuntu, imagine deploying some custom/proprietary service you want isolated from whatever else the client has on the machine) would have all the long hashes auto-magically inserted to produce this (this is on my machine, all i had to write was "services.openssh.enable = true;" but additional configuration is available, see https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html#services.openssh.):

  [Unit]
  After=network.target
  Description=SSH Daemon
  X-Restart-Triggers=/nix/store/d4ys2c8kzzcp3g4fv3ivy7a5nkayg7w2-sshd.conf-validated

  [Service]
  Environment="LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/nix/store/71mr6yjmia7y8lw4g5ghk5ag9yq5ir2i-nss-mdns-0.10/lib:/nix/store/zbxfs37qjj6ddrfnzrdnxnkrvvm1ddsf-systemd-245.3/lib"
  Environment="LOCALE_ARCHIVE=/nix/store/9b725cly2a6a61vb8bgz7cyr0xr8y2av-glibc-locales-2.30/lib/locale/locale-archive"
  Environment="PATH=/nix/store/5yx7mv7md9c9nldj69inrnr7rjdkzqq3-openssh-8.2p1/bin:/nix/store/miwvn81sgbbcq5bfglr6v3pwchgsd00c-gawk-5.0.1/bin:/nix/store/ca9mkrf8sa8md8pv61jslhcnfk9mmg4p-coreutils-8.31/bin:/nix/store/hg3albf7g05ljfqrfjhd58rblimrp6ph-findutils-4.7.0/bin:/nix/store/8pajzfyqx1v7dz1znrnrc4pqj5rmnx24-gnugrep-3.4/bin:/nix/store/jpqlmf3wqg281j8fdz50kjl525pfsxjc-gnused-4.8/bin:/nix/store/zbxfs37qjj6ddrfnzrdnxnkrvvm1ddsf-systemd-245.3/bin:/nix/store/5yx7mv7md9c9nldj69inrnr7rjdkzqq3-openssh-8.2p1/sbin:/nix/store/miwvn81sgbbcq5bfglr6v3pwchgsd00c-gawk-5.0.1/sbin:/nix/store/ca9mkrf8sa8md8pv61jslhcnfk9mmg4p-coreutils-8.31/sbin:/nix/store/hg3albf7g05ljfqrfjhd58rblimrp6ph-findutils-4.7.0/sbin:/nix/store/8pajzfyqx1v7dz1znrnrc4pqj5rmnx24-gnugrep-3.4/sbin:/nix/store/jpqlmf3wqg281j8fdz50kjl525pfsxjc-gnused-4.8/sbin:/nix/store/zbxfs37qjj6ddrfnzrdnxnkrvvm1ddsf-systemd-245.3/sbin"
  Environment="TZDIR=/nix/store/wmry9mqmimq8ib8ijli4g1yx92gxjli5-tzdata-2019c/share/zoneinfo"
  
  
  X-StopIfChanged=false
  ExecStart=/nix/store/5yx7mv7md9c9nldj69inrnr7rjdkzqq3-openssh-8.2p1/bin/sshd -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  ExecStartPre=/nix/store/1mzzy0dwjzy6kcwad7q79pvc444yn288-unit-script-sshd-pre-start
  KillMode=process
  Restart=always
  Type=simple

No symlinks to /etc/sshd. This service would be independent from other software on the host system, other than PID1 managing it.

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Re:What Is Nix? by mehrdadn on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @09:45PM (#23254065)

Interesting, thank you! So that means programs are sometimes patched to look for configs in nonstandard locations generated by Nix during installation time. But then if I wish to change any of those configs (maybe to change one of the defaults)... I have to copy them, make my modifications, generate my own package for them, and install them to wire them in as substitutes for the existing packages. Then when the upstream package changes the config file, I have to generate a new package with all the conflicts manually resolved, right? It seems a bit of an arduous process, though I do see the appeal.

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Re:What Is Nix? by jbboehr on Thursday May 21, 2020 @07:50PM (#23267044)

> programs are sometimes patched to look for configs in nonstandard locations generated by Nix

This may be true, but typically the NixOS module will specify the generated config file via the command line [0] or symlink the generated config to the default location in /etc [1]. I don't believe it's terribly common to patch programs to have different config file paths in nixpkgs.

If you're just using plain Nix on a foreign distro, and not, say, home-manager or similar, it's up to you to provide your own configuration including service units. Presumably you could use Nix for this as well, but I'm not terribly familiar with using Nix on foreign distros.

[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/de493bd74921139860624e... [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/de493bd74921139860624e...

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Re:What Is Nix? by geofft on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @10:03PM (#23254168)

Woah, I'm lost here. The idea is that it uses /etc/ssh/sshd_config as its input? (How do you handle upgrades, then?) What is d4ys2c8kzzcp3g4fv3ivy7a5nkayg7w2?

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Re:What Is Nix? by jbboehr on Thursday May 21, 2020 @08:15PM (#23267258)

In NixOS, typically the config files will be generated from scratch using the Nix language, see for example sshd [0] or bind [1].

`d4ys2c8kzzcp3g4fv3ivy7a5nkayg7w2` is a hash of the inputs to a derivation (a package in Nix terms).

In a sense, at it's lowest level, a derivation is a function `f(x) -> y` where `x` is some Nix expressions (including the inputs and how to build it, often in bash) and `y` is a nix store path. The nix store path includes the hash which is a hash of `x`.

For bind, the config file itself is a derivation, it just uses a plain string (interpolated with variables via Nix) into the writeText wrapper.

[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/de493bd74921139860624e... [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/de493bd74921139860624e...

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