blueprint - lean flake

STATUS: experimental

Are you tired of copy-pasting Nix code and gluing everything together by hand?

Nix is just a tool. It should help you, and stay out of the way. But because it's so flexible, everybody goes trough a 3 month period where they figure out how to structure their home repo. flake.nix files all over the internet become fatter and fatter with more glue code.

By making a few opinionated choices, we're able to cut 99% of the glue code you would find in most repos. A bit like Ruby on Rails did for web frameworks, we do it for Nix packages.

In some ways, this is the spiritual successor to flake-utils, my first attempt at making flakes easier to use.

What it's good for:

• Home and SME configurations
• Package sets

What it's bad for:

• Complicated setups (although we try to provide gracefull fallback)
• Developer environments (see devenv.sh)

Design principles

• KISS. We don't need complicated module systems with infinite recursions.
• 1:1 mapping.
• Keep the mapping between attributes predictable.
• Think about user workflows.

Features

• default formatter
• lib folder
• templates folder
• packages folder
• supports overridable systems (see nix-systems)
• default flake checks
• NixOS configurations
• NixOS modules
• Darwin modules
• devshell

TODO

• Darwin configurations

• Home configurations

• bp CLI to:

  • login Nix to github
  • add/remove inputs
  • update inputs
  • flatten inputs to automate the input follows

• GitHub Actions integration

Blacklisted inputs

In order to avoid name clashes, avoid loading inputs with the following names:

• lib
• pname
• system
• pkgs

Getting started

$ ./example/flake.nix

{
  description = "my flake";

  # Add all your dependencies here
  inputs = {
    blueprint.url = "path:..";
  };

  # Keep the magic invocations to minimum.
  outputs = inputs: inputs.blueprint { inherit inputs; };
}

Packages folder

If the ./pkgs folder exists, load every sub-folder in it and map it to the packages output.

Each sub-folder should contain a default.nix, with the following function signature:

• pname: name of the folder. Useful to inject back.
• all the inputs

How to support overrides?

Don't

How to support overlays?

Don't

Related projects

• flake-utils the OG for flake libraries.
• flake-utils-plus extending flake-utils with more stuff.
• flake-parts uses the Nix module system. It's too complicated for my taste.
• std ??
• snowflake-lib