from Hacker News

Show HN: Garnix, fast and easy CI for Nix

by jkarni on 10/8/22, 11:35 AM with 63 comments

Hello HN!

For the past few months, I've been building a Nix-specific CI service, and quite a few people have been productively using it, so I thought I'd Show HN it.

You might be wondering why build a Nix-specific CI. It turns out its quite hard to get a really good CI setup for Nix without spending a lot of time or money on it (or both), and even then solutions don't tend to be optimal.

Garnix, on the other hand, handles everything, and simply. Just create an account, install the GitHub app on the repositories you want, and you're good to go! Each package gets its own GitHub check, and separate log output, which makes it really easy to figure out what went wrong (you can see an example here: https://garnix.io/build/X9knYZOB). Builds are very fast compared to e.g Github Actions. The build artifacts are made available in a Nix cache so you never have to rebuild locally. And there are builders for x86-64 Linux as well as M1 Macs and aarch64 Linux.

Try it out: https://garnix.io. It's free, though if you like it, consider donating! (Note that it only works with flakes.)

Cheers, Julian

  • by simjue on 10/8/22, 1:09 PM

    > It's free

    But is it open-source? I can't find the code.

  • by solatic on 10/8/22, 2:53 PM

    So, you're trying to build a more integrated service than Hercules (https://hercules-ci.com/)? How would you compare it?

  • by yewenjie on 10/8/22, 1:21 PM

    I have been using it for past four months and have been generally happy with it. Any clue about when you're thinking of either open-sourcing it or launching paid plans?

  • by forgotpwd16 on 10/8/22, 2:28 PM

    >To top it all up, we run on 100% renewable energy.

    How is that? You run the entire infrastructure on solar panels or something?

  • by stuzenz on 10/9/22, 1:49 AM

    Hi Julian,

    I just had a play with Garnix - and have to say I am impressed. Nicely executed.

    Nice to see nix and flakes hitting hackernews through projects/services like this.

  • by return_to_monke on 10/8/22, 5:15 PM

    Why would you recommend using this over for example GitHub Actions (also free) with a workflow that installs nix and then builds the flake?

  • by blakesmith on 10/8/22, 5:20 PM

    This looks really cool, and showcases how simple CI can be if every git repository exposes a nix flake. Congrats on shipping!

  • by nkmnz on 10/8/22, 12:56 PM

    love the name

  • by mplanchard on 10/8/22, 2:20 PM

    Looks pretty nice! Any plans or thoughts around supporting GitLab?