This is useful for one-off situations where you want to specify a
builder on the command line instead of having to mess with
nix.machines. E.g.
$ nix-build -A hello --argstr system x86_64-darwin \
--option builders 'root@macstadium1 x86_64-darwin'
will perform the specified build on "macstadium1".
It also removes the need for a separate nix.machines file since you
can specify builders in nix.conf directly. (In fact nix.machines is
yet another hack that predates the general nix.conf configuration
file, IIRC.)
Note: this option is supported by the daemon for trusted users. The
fact that this allows trusted users to specify paths to SSH keys to
which they don't normally have access is maybe a bit too much trust...
For backwards compatibility, if the URI is just a hostname, ssh://
(i.e. LegacySSHStore) is prepended automatically.
Also, all fields except the URI are now optional. For example, this is
a valid nix.machines file:
local?root=/tmp/nix
This is useful for testing the remote build machinery since you don't
have to mess around with ssh.
This is to simplify remote build configuration. These environment
variables predate nix.conf.
The build hook now has a sensible default (namely build-remote).
The current load is kept in the Nix state directory now.
Since build-remote uses buildDerivation() now, we don't need to copy
the .drv file anymore. This greatly reduces the set of input paths
copied to the remote side (e.g. from 392 to 51 store paths for GNU
hello on x86_64-darwin).
This default implementation of buildPaths() does nothing if all
requested paths are already valid, and throws an "unsupported
operation" error otherwise. This fixes a regression introduced by
c30330df6f in binary cache and legacy
SSH stores.
The typical use is to inherit Config and add Setting<T> members:
class MyClass : private Config
{
Setting<int> foo{this, 123, "foo", "the number of foos to use"};
Setting<std::string> bar{this, "blabla", "bar", "the name of the bar"};
MyClass() : Config(readConfigFile("/etc/my-app.conf"))
{
std::cout << foo << "\n"; // will print 123 unless overriden
}
};
Currently, this is used by Store and its subclasses for store
parameters. You now get a warning if you specify a non-existant store
parameter in a store URI.
This provides a significant speedup, e.g. 64 s -> 12 s for
nix-build --dry-run -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-16.03 '<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
on a cold local and CloudFront cache.
The alternative is to use lots of concurrent daemon connections but
that seems wasteful.
This is useless because the client also caches path info, and can
cause problems for long-running clients like hydra-queue-runner
(i.e. it may return cached info about paths that have been
garbage-collected).
This fixes "No such file or directory" when opening /dev/ptmx
(e.g. http://hydra.nixos.org/build/51094249).
The reason appears to be some changes to /dev/ptmx / /dev/pts handling
between Linux 4.4 and 4.9. See
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/7832531/.
The fix is to go back to mounting a proper /dev/pts instance inside
the sandbox. Happily, this now works inside user namespaces, even for
unprivileged users. So
NIX_REMOTE=local?root=/tmp/nix nix-build \
'<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
works for non-root users.
The downside is that the fix breaks sandbox builds on older kernels
(probably pre-4.6), since mounting a devpts fails inside user
namespaces for some reason I've never been able to figure out. Builds
on those systems will fail with
error: while setting up the build environment: mounting /dev/pts: Invalid argument
Ah well.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
