nix-bonito

README

nix-bonito

bonito is a declarative Nix channels manager. It is written to replace some of Flakes' features. It also provides compatibility with the global Flakes registry.

Install

go install github.com/diamondburned/nix-bonito/cmd/bonito@latest

Usage

bonito is meant to be used with a VCS such as Git. As a result, changes to the configuration file and its checksum files should be committed so that they can be rolled back using the VCS.

# Initialize and update with an existing config.
bonito # uses $HOSTNAME.toml, OR
bonito -c hackadoll3.toml

# Update channels that are referenced as branches (refs), such as
# "github:NixOS/nixpkgs nixos-unstable".
bonito -u

# Update a single channel.
bonito -u nixos-unstable

For an example configuration, see the Example file.

Using with Flakes

To use bonito with Flakes, simply toggle flakes on (see Example file) and point your nix.registry file to the JSON file generated by bonito.

The generated file will end with .registry.json.

Example Nix configuration:

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:

{
  # generated from hackadoll3.toml
  nix.registry = builtins.fromJSON (builtins.readFile ./hackadoll3.registry.json);
}

Why not Flakes?

In case you don't know, Nix introduced an experimental feature named Flakes, which effectively allows the user to declaratively define all impure inputs in a flake.nix file, completely replacing Nix channels. These impure inputs are then locked in a flake.lock file.

The idea of locking input dependencies under a file isn't new: we know that Go does it with go.mod, Rust does it with Cargo.lock, NodeJS does it with package-lock.json, etc.

The reason why I wrote bonito instead of using Flakes is because Flakes tries too hard to be a smart tool, which ends up making it very frustrating to use. A list of quirks that I don't like about Flakes include:

• Flakes detects if you're in a Git repository and impose weird restrictions based on that. This makes using it a bit more frustrating.
• Flakes are still mostly experimental. At the time this was written, the CLI tools have lots of quirks, many of which makes it barely usable.
• Flakes caused an infinite recursion error on my config for very mysterious reasons. Writing bonito took me less time than debugging that error.

Known Quirks

Error: cannot resolve lock: error reading symbolic link '...nixpkgs'

Some channels, such as Home Manager, have a dependency on Nixpkgs. When bonito starts without a .lock file, it must add a channel to resolve it, then remove it. Home Manager cannot be added and updated without Nixpkgs, however, and there is no way to keep the order of the channel list to express dependency, so this use case is not supported at all.

A workaround is to run bonito on a setup with the nixos or nixpkgs channel, then set override-channels = false first. Once the .lock file is generated, override-channels can be set to true.