Cachix Blog

One of the most requested features, the so-called upstream caches was released today. It is enabled by default for all caches, and the owner of the binary cache can disable it via Settings. When you push store paths to Cachix, querying cache.nixos.org adds overhead of multiples of 100ms, but you save storage and possibly minutes for avoiding the pushing of already available paths. Queries to cache.nixos.org are also cached, so that subsequent push operations do not have the overhead. [Read More]

Documentation is an important ingredient of a successful software project. Last few weeks I’ve worked on improving status quo on two fronts: 1) https://nix.dev is an opinionated guide for developers getting things done using the Nix ecosystem. A few highlights: Getting started repository template with a tutorial for using declarative and reproducible developer environments Setting up GitHub Actions with Nix Nix language anti-patterns to avoid and recommended alternatives [Read More]

I’m lucky to be in touch with a lot of people that use Nix day to day. One of the most occouring annoyances that pops up more frequently with those starting with Nix are confusing error messages. Since Nix community has previously succesfully stepped up and funded removal of Perl to reduce barriers for source code contributions, I think we ought to do the same for removing barriers when using Nix. [Read More]

Cachix - Nix binary cache hosting, has grown quite a bit in recent months in terms of day to day usage and that was mostly noticable on bandwidth. Over 3000 GB were served in December 2019. CDN by CloudFlare Increased usage prompted a few backend machine instance upgrades to handle concurrent upload/downloads, but it became clear it’s time to abandon single machine infrastructure. As of today, all binary caches are served by CloudFlare CDN. [Read More]