from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you use Nix or NixOS at work?

by vinniepukh on 11/18/24, 8:21 PM with 7 comments

• by pxc on 11/27/24, 8:44 PM

  We use Nix to distribute open-source application security tools to user endpoints and CI/CD environments at work. Our appsec program is still young and there's lots of things I look forward to improving or seeing improved in our tooling and infrastructure, but it's already usable, and Nix was a huge help in letting our tiny team quickly put together something flexible, useful, and capable of accommodating the many SCM platforms, CI/CD systems, and operating systems that are in use across our large company.

  My team also uses Nix and devenv to manage the local development environments for a fair range of things: some AWS Lambda functions, some CLI tools, our Terraform repo, and an internal docs site, on both macOS and WSL. There are occasionally pain points, but it's also occasionally proven able to solve very annoying Python native library dependency problems for us. Nix interest and expertise across the team varies, but devenv is pretty transparent to the folks less interested in working with it than just relying on it, so that's been good.

  My own system at work is a Mac (for the time being, Mac and Windows are our only choices). I use Nix mainly natively on macOS rather than through virtualization, but mostly manage my packages declaratively through Nix-Darwin and Home Manager rather than using Nix as a package manager in the conventional way.

  I do have a NixOS VM running via OrbStack, though. Currently, I don't often use it interactively, but it's configured as a remote SSH builder so that OrbStack's SSH proxy automagically spins up the VM whenever it's called upon, even if OrbStack itself isn't running beforehand. That's pretty cool, and means Nix on my Mac can transparently build packages for four architectures (every combination of MacOS/Linux and x86_64/aarch64) without recourse to cross-compilation or any manual management on my part. I don't need that particular nicety often, but when I do use it, it makes me smile.

• by adamtulinius on 11/23/24, 11:31 PM

  We use it for a huge part of our infrastructure. 3000+ pods running on an on-premise K8s cluster, with most supporting services and systems also running on NixOS. We could never have done what we do, with the manpower we have, with something like Debian+ansible.

• by userlander on 11/18/24, 8:59 PM

  I use NixOS on my personal computers and Nix the package manager along with home manager on my work computer. Im a big fan of Nix, but it's easy to lose many hours going down the Nix rabbit hole.

• by mastertask on 11/22/24, 5:47 PM

  You shouldn't use something experimental like NixOS and Nix at work, that's fine at home or as a hobby.