Nix

Reproducible builds, developer environments, service orchestrations, CI checks, and more!

At Composable, we use Nix to build all of our products and services with a single tool. This ensures that our builds are reproducible, declarative, and reliable.

Nix is the only build tool you will need at Composable. There is no need to install cargo, rustup, tsc, node, cmake, libssl, or any other system package. Our dependencies, including system dependencies, and env vars, are declared in our Nix configurations.

Nix also defines our declarative development environments. So you do not have to set up any packages on your machine to start developing. Instead, you only need a Nix install, and running nix develop in our repository.

Nix provides us with a single, uniform interface across all products. You do not need to understand the underlying build tools for our frontend-pablo-server or our devnet-picasso. You just run both of them with nix run "#frontend-pablo-server" and nix run ".#devnet-picasso".

Nix also cuts your check-fix feedback-loop by running all CI checks locally, and provides you with helpful deterministic utilities like formatting the entire repository with a single command.

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Let's get started and install Nix!