About

All releases of nodejs built and accessible under a single flake.

It's like nvm but for nix!

Setup

Setting up the registry

Via the CLI

nix registry add node 'github:andyrichardson/nix-node'

In configuration.nix

nix.registry."node".to = {
  type = "github";
  owner = "Aethusx";
  repo = "nix-node";
};

Setting up the binary cache

Via the CLI

cachix use nix-node

In configuration.nix

nix.binaryCaches = [ "https://cache.nixos.org/" "https://nix-node.cachix.org/" ]

Usage

Using latest major releases

nix shell node#16

Using explicit release versions

nix shell node#16.3.0

Contributing

Open to contributions for supporting more versions, architectures, etc.

Adding new versions

Get the checksum for the new version.

version="1.0.0"
nix-prefetch-url --type sha256 "https://nodejs.org/dist/v$version/node-v$version.tar.xz"

Update flake.nix with new version and checksum.

Update CI build to build new version.

Garbage Collector cleans up builds

When using

nix-collect-garbage -d

it also cleans all our node builds, to prevent we can do a 'root' syslink.

First find the node-js instance in /nix/store/, you can use this command:

find /nix/store -maxdepth 1 -name '*node*'

Then use this command to create root syslink

nix-store --add-root /opt/nodejs-root-16 --indirect --realise /nix/store/b2xyc0fwax961h6bja0j371zg7b0mvnr-nodejs-16.20.2

/opt/nodejs-root-16 can be anything, remember it must be unique for every node version /nix/store/b2xyc0fwax961h6bja0j371zg7b0mvnr-nodejs-16.20.2 is our nodejs path, replace it with whatever nodejs instance you want to keep from getting cleaned by garbage collector