Nix Flake Template for Elixir?

Questions / Help
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I apologize in advance if I am posting this in the wrong place.

I see a nix package for Elixir (in fact I see several). Big kudos to those folks who have taken the time to do this!

I want to create a nix flake for an Elixir app I’m working on and I can create a plain old nix flake but I was wondering if someone has already created a nix flake template for Elixir? Googling hasn’t turned up anything (although I may be using the wrong search terms).

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Thank you! That’s a big help!

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I maintain some OSS Nix<->BEAM tooling, which offers flake init templates, support for ingesting asdf .tool-versions files, reusable dev shells and a few other niceties, based on flake-parts lib. Repo is here and feedback or critiques are welcome. Example usage is also documented here.

I’ve been iterating and daily driving it for a couple years at this point, and haven’t had asdf/mise/rtx installed at all in the last 18 months or so.

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Hey, @Onor.io. Very happy to see that you like Nix.

After the post mentioned by @zimt28, my workflow improved a lot. If you continue to use Nix, I believe you will encounter some issues, like:

  1. How to init a project quickly?
  2. How to package an Elixir app as a Nix derivation?
  3. How to package an Elixir app as a Docker image with Nix?

I really like building Docker image with Nix Flake - I don’t have to sync .dockerignore with .gitignore anymore.

All above problems already have solutions, I hope the following links are also useful to you in the future.

  1. using Nix template: You can create your own nix-dev-template by following the-nix-way/dev-templates or c4710n/nix-dev-templates, etc.
  2. Check out nix-dev-templates/elixir/phoenix/nix/release.nix at 8c8ed3b805c043e2666124fa2b4e22067ca1d0df · c4710n/nix-dev-templates · GitHub.
  3. Check out nix-dev-templates/elixir/phoenix/flake.nix at 8c8ed3b805c043e2666124fa2b4e22067ca1d0df · c4710n/nix-dev-templates · GitHub
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Thank you so much for the pointers Shane! I’m sure that will help me to progress with employing Nix with Elixir!

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Thank you so much for providing those links!

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Hi again Shane,

Just curious–do you ever use your nix stuff in order to build docker images? That’s one of the use cases I definitely wanted to try.

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I use it and enjoy doing so for non-BEAM work, it works pretty well for Rust and Golang binaries, but the output for Elixir was somewhat inferior to a naive Dockerfile as of a year or two ago. The closure size was even larger than a normal Debian based image, but I never bothered to triage why or file issues or PRs to nixpkgs about it. Part of it was that it considered systemd(!) a propagated input.

If I wanted to make it work today I’d use the erlang_nox or erlang_minimal package set to omit wx stuff, and the recently file set support to make sure I didn’t get extra blobs from the source tree or spurious rebuilds.

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Thanks Shane! I appreciate your insights on this!