2025-12-24
I probably would have switched off of Nix for system management, but with Claude Code, any problems I run into are as good as solved.
Tag: nix
22 entries
Fixing Nix When Upgrading To macOS Sequoia
I upgraded to macOS Sequoia a few weeks ago. I had a feeling this update wasn't going to be trivial with my Nix setup, but after trying to upgrade to a newer package version on unstable, I got a message that seemed to imply I needed to upgrade the OS, so I went for it. Also, I was at least...
2024-04-19
I did a refactor of my nix config following a pattern I learned from reading Davis' setup. My two main uses right now for Nix/home-manager are to install and configure programs. Some of these programs have nix modules that allow for the configuration to be written in Nix. Others don't, but you can...
2024-04-13
I enjoyed this article by Ken about production LLM use cases with OpenAI models. When it comes to prompts, less is more
Installing git-lfs with Nix
I was pulling the openai/evals repo and trying to running some of the examples. The repo uses git-lfs, so I installed that to my system using home-manager.
2024-03-15
I've spend almost a week, on and off, trying to install ollama using Nix in such a way that ollama serve will be run and managed automatically in the background. Initially, I had tried to install ollama via home-manager. This was straightforward, but finding a way to have ollama serve run...
2024-03-11
I played around with AgentGPT using Reworkd's cloud hosted instance. I tried a few different goals. The first was travel related. I was pleasantly surprised (unnerved) to see the agent return links for flights to my proposed location from my actual current origin (I guess they used my IP to...
Using Nix to Install `llm` with Plugins
I use Simon's llm to quickly run LLM prompts. This package is easily installed with brew or pip, so if you want to use it, I recommend those approaches. The following approach is not for the faint of heart and assumes a bit of familiarity with Nix and home-manager. We are going to install the llm...
2024-03-07
I like Nix a lot. I still don't understand a lot about it. I cannot lose an hour to installing a dependencies when that is a solved problem using Homebrew.
Installing Python Packages with Nix
I've been meaning to try out Simon's llm package for a while now. From reading the docs and following the development, it's a modular, meet-you-where-you-are CLI for running LLM inference locally or using almost any API out there. In the past, I might have installed this with brew, but we run nix...
Using devbox for a local PostgreSQL database
Devbox, is an interesting, nix-based tool for setting up reproducible development environments. I recently needed to quickly setup a postgres database and load the Chinook dataset to play around with some queries. I could have used Docker, but I am not a fan of its UI or how heavyweight it has...
Managing Multiple Tool Versions with Nix
This post is extremely similar to nix flakes and direnv. Here, I repeated my process, but with a little more thought and a little less language model magic.
Nix Channels and the Linux Builder
I was following this guide to setup nix-darwin on a new Mac when I ran into an issue following the section about cross-compiling Linux binaries. I put this issue to the side when I first encountered it because I was trying to setup dependency management for my new system and this problem didn't...
Nix and Direnv with Flakes
Last year I wrote about nix and direnv as I explored the potential convenience of an isolated, project-specific environment. There were some interesting initial learnings about nix, but I didn't really know what I was doing. Now, I still don't know what I'm doing, but I've been doing it for...
2024-02-05
After playing around with home-manager for a bit, I realized what I really wanted was to have nix-darwin manage my system and use my home-manager config as a module. It took a bit of trial and error and searching to figure out how to make this work, but I did eventually find a way. With nix-darwin,...
2024-02-04
I pivoted to using home-manager using the standalone installation. It seems to provide a reasonable starting point and a found a fair bit of prior art when searching Github, so my hope was there would be good examples to model off of. It took me a frustrating time to realize after running...
2024-02-03
Today, was a first day setting up a new computer. I spent most of the time installing applications and building up my setting with declarative configurations. This site has been helpful. I also started this walkthrough for setting up nix on a Mac.
Sandboxed Python Environment
Disclaimer: I am not a security expert or a security professional.
Nix Language
To broaden my knowledge of nix, I'm working through an Overview of the Nix Language.
Zero to Nix
I started working through the Zero to Nix guide. This is a light introduction that touch on a few of the command line tools that come with nix and how they can be used to build local and remote projects and enter developer environments. While many of the examples are high level concept you'd...
2023-07-09
I've been playing around more with nix lately. I like what I've seen from it so far: declare dependencies and get an isolated shell with those dependencies. If distributed, the environment can be trivially recreated on another machine. So far, it's been a struggle to get a working Python...
2023-07-04
I've been working through a series on nix-flakes. It's well written and shows some interesting applications of the tool set. I'm still trying to wrap my head around exactly where nix could fit in in my development lifecycle. It seems like it wraps up builds and package management into one. Sort of...