From 2e59767da80a8eda535187331a5b09abb49744d8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Youwen Wu <youwenw@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2025 03:50:02 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] feat: add continuous integration notes

---
 content/Hacks/nixos-cheat-sheet.md | 35 ++++++++++++++++++++
 content/Hacks/nixos-ci.md          | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 86 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 content/Hacks/nixos-ci.md

diff --git a/content/Hacks/nixos-cheat-sheet.md b/content/Hacks/nixos-cheat-sheet.md
index 68ba015..c1e0ea2 100644
--- a/content/Hacks/nixos-cheat-sheet.md
+++ b/content/Hacks/nixos-cheat-sheet.md
@@ -125,6 +125,41 @@ stdenv.mkDerivation {
 }
 ```
 
+### Automatic updating derivations
+
+Nix is powerful but also annoying at times. One of the most common issues is
+how to automatically keep a derivation up to date.
+
+When you fetch remote files in Nix, you need to provide Nix with a hash so that
+it can guarantee the output is reproducible. This is a consequence of network
+only being available in the "fixed output derivation".
+
+When we automatically update a Nix derivation's sources, we need to take care
+to both update the URL or revision and also the corresponding output hash.
+
+The hash can be obtained using the `nix store prefetch-file` command, which
+replaces the old and inferior `nix-prefetch-url`.
+
+However this command doesn't return a clean hash that we can just pipe around
+in our shell. We can add the `--json` flag and get a JSON object with the hash
+in the `hash` property. Such as the following:
+
+```nu
+# this is a nushell script because i hate jq
+nix store prefetch-file https://my-file.com/file --json | from json | get hash
+```
+
+We can then take our new URL and hash and then update our derivation. One way
+to do this is with `sed` to modify the derivation in place, but this is kind of
+janky. Another way is to create a JSON file that contains the URL and hash and
+read it from Nix using `builtins.readFile` and `builtins.fromJSON`. This is
+much easier since you can trivially generate JSON files using shell commands
+(especially in Nushell).
+
+The above process can be ran in CI to have fully automatic updating
+derivations. See [[continuous-integration-in-nix-projects]] for writing on Nix
+in CI.
+
 ## nixpkgs and the nixpkgs lib
 
 General stuff related to quirks in nixpkgs and `lib`.
diff --git a/content/Hacks/nixos-ci.md b/content/Hacks/nixos-ci.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f185c12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/Hacks/nixos-ci.md
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+id: nixos-ci
+aliases: []
+tags: []
+---
+
+# Continuous integration in Nix projects
+
+This is where I'm keeping all of my research and notes on continuous
+integration in the Nix ecosystem.
+
+One of the very powerful parts of using Nix to manage your project builds and
+dependencies is being able to have one single source of truth, for development,
+deployment, and CI. You write your Nix expressions once and get the same
+environment everywhere. No need to specify dependencies again and again for
+every single environment. Mitchell Hashimoto has written about this extensively
+[on his
+blog](https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles).
+
+## Basic GitHub action
+
+A guilty habit I've gotten into is setting up CI for every single project I
+work on and really putting those GitHub actions free minutes to use. It's so
+trivial when using Nix, since you literally don't have to do anything extra the
+majority of the time. Just copy paste in a GitHub action that installs Nix and
+runs `nix build`. That's it.
+
+```yaml
+name: "Check and build flake"
+on:
+  pull_request:
+  push:
+    branches: [main]
+
+jobs:
+  lints:
+    name: Build
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    steps:
+      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
+      - name: Check flake inputs
+        uses: DeterminateSystems/flake-checker-action@v4
+      - name: Install Nix
+        uses: DeterminateSystems/nix-installer-action@main
+      - uses: DeterminateSystems/magic-nix-cache-action@main
+      - run: nix flake check --all-systems
+      - run: nix build .
+```
+
+This action can basically be dropped in as-is to a Nix project and start
+providing basic CI.