Replacing brew with nix
I've been meaning to try nix for a while now. I forgot when is the exact time that I read about it for the first time but after reading a bit about it I have this idea of using nix to replace Ansible for managing servers. In the sense that configuring the server in a deterministic way.
So last weekend I tried it out. A couple reading materials that I use as the guidance:
Julia Evans' posts really help a lot. She wrote it in the perspective of a new user. I can understand a few early pages in the tutorial on nix.dev and zero-to-nix but after that I kind of get lost. Like it got complicated fast.
So I decided to take it easy. For now I am just using it to replace homebrew as my machine's package manager. Two concerns that I have with installing packages using nix:
- Is it safe?
- Does nix have all the packages that I need now and later on in the future?
For the first question I think, from the perspective of someone like me who
more often than not just blindly run brew install a-package up until now, it's
as safe as using brew. One thing that's neat with the nix package in nixos.org
is that there is a link to the source.
For example, the neovim package. At the time that I write this the source is defined by the package.nix file in nixpkgs repository in GitHub. Granted that currently I don't fully understand the file right now, but the more I learn nix the more I can make sense of what makes a package as defined in the package.nix file.
For the second question, so far I think nix have all the packages that I need.
So for now, anytime I want to install a package I just run nix profile install.