This is the second post in a new series from Scarf: Spotlights.
In our previous post, we highlighted an exciting open source project, the problems the developers were solving, and how they were leveraging Scarf.
The Community Spotlight will focus on an awesome community, what they do, and how they are leveraging Scarf.
nix-community
The nix-community is a companion project to the larger NixOS ecosystem. NixOS holds mission-critical projects like {% c-line %}Nix{% c-line-end %}, {% c-line %}Nixpkgs{% c-line-end %}, {% c-line %}Hydra{% c-line-end %}, and more. On the other hand, nix-community is a space to develop projects related to NixOS.
It is a playground where developers gain flexible maintenance, build infrastructure, and more.
What We Love About nix-community 💖
On GitHub you can find a variety of useful open source projects provided by the nix-community.
Some notable projects include:
- Home Manager: A project that provides a basic system for managing a user environment. It uses the Nix package manager together with the Nix libraries in Nixpkgs.
- nixos-generators: With this project you can take a NixOs configuration and generate outputs for different target formats like iso, lxc, and more.
- Awesome Nix: You can use this curated list of Nix resources if you want to learn how to use Nix, find other Nix communities or use Nix with other programming languages like Elm, Haskell, PHP, and a lot more.
Be sure to check out their GitHub repository to see even more projects.
nix-community + Scarf 🧣
Nix-community currently uses Scarf to distribute containers from their {% c-line %}Docker-nixpkgs{% c-line-end %} project. It is hosted via Scarf Gateway. {% c-line %}Docker-nixpkgs{% c-line-end %} is a collection of docker containers that gets automatically published whenever {% c-line %}nixpkgs{% c-line-end %}, a collection of over 50k software packages, gets updated.
The Scarf Solution
Nix-community uses Scarf’s analytics to better understand usage and adoption of the containers they publish. This helps them decide which images are worth investing their time into and how to prioritize their work.
This is what Jonas Chevalier, the Director of Numtide, had to say about the latest wild-card feature used in the {% c-line %}Docker-nixpkgs{% c-line-end %} package :
“The latest wildcard feature from Scarf was particularly useful for us because of the nature of the project. It means that we don't need to keep Scarf in sync with Docker Hub, it handles everything out of the gate.”
You can read more about the wildcard support and how it is making it easier to manage a large number of packages in our “New Year, New Scarf Features” post.
Learn More
To learn more about the nix-community:
- Website: https://nix-community.org/
- GitHub Organization: https://github.com/nix-community
To learn more about Scarf and Scarf Gateway:
- Website: https://about.scarf.sh/
- Documentation: https://docs.scarf.sh/