Have an officially hosted and/or endorsed binary cache for deploy-rs

[soupglasses]

Provide a binary cache for deploy-rs, for example trough the use of cachix. I find it strange that everyone using deploy-rs still needs to compile it on their own, or set up their own binary cache for the use with their teams.

There used to be a personal cachix repo for deploy-rs, but it is now unmaintained https://github.com/cmacrae/deploy-rs-binary-builds

@cmacrae do you have any potential advice for creating an official cache?

[drupol]

I'm sharing this point of view and hope there will be a binary cache soon... Or better, why not add this tool in nixpkgs ? It would then by default use the official Nixos cache.

[misuzu]

NixOS/nixpkgs#182950

[drupol]

I think we can now close this thing.

[soupglasses]

I still think this issue should stay open, as the nixpkgs is not documented as an officially supported method of installing deploy-rs's binaries. While nixpkgs is now a great way to get a binary package of deploy-rs, it is not documented. And i think that is important to get before this issue is closed.

[teto]

deploy-rs is a very small project, I see little value for a cache ?

[wmertens]

@teto but Rust is huge

[wmertens]

So what is the way to use the nixpkgs version? Still use this flake for configuration but for the binary use the nixpkgs one?

[wmertens]

I found that I can indeed use the flake as library code and but it was importing the flake's deploy-rs instead of using the nixpkgs one.

So I copied the lib.activate code into my own flake and set final to be just nixpkgs, removing the overlay entirely.

So perhaps the lib.activate.* functions could take an argument to use either the flake's version or nixpkgs' one?

[teto]

@wmertens yeah I think I underestimated the build, I install a deploy-rs from the flake and it does take a bit of time to build on CI. So count me interested too now (one can use nixpkgs but I like using software from flakes, makes forking easier)

[dschrempf]

I also came across this issue. When using deploy-rs from Nixpkgs, and deploying a flake using the deploy-rs flake, the executable recompiles, because the flake library code references a different version. The solution of @wmertens works but is a bit cumbersome.

[soupglasses]

@wmertens yeah I think I underestimated the build, I install a deploy-rs from the flake and it does take a bit of time to build on CI. So count me interested too now (one can use nixpkgs but I like using software from flakes, makes forking easier)

Yeah i got a intel i3 laptop i usually deploy from, and deploy-rs rebuilds on it take upwards of 15 minutes.

Also, CI runners on GitHub only have 2 cores. So using deploy-rs for CI testing would essentially require a full setup of a binary cache for your project. Which does not track with the project's otherwise simple to use and deploy model.

[dnaq]

I’d like to revive this discussion a bit, this becomes extra annoying if deploying to a different target architecture and having to build the activate binary using qemu, which takes forever.

Another option might be to separate the derivations for deploy and activate into two, and maybe even replacing activate with a shell script. That would probably alleviate the need for a binary cache.

[soupglasses]

I have understood a lot of the pain comes from the fact that the exported deploy checks link to self.packages.${system}.default over final.deploy-rs¹, so it will always compile the nightly deploy-rs from this repository over another deploy-rs binary.

The simplest thing would likely be to have it point to final.deploy-rs, and export an extra overlay to replace the deploy-rs package with the nightly in this repo if the end user wants it.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs/blob/2a3c5f70eee04a465aa534d8bd4fcc9bb3c4a8ce/flake.nix#L77 ↩

[soupglasses]

For people who want something that works today, I just pushed my reworked deploy-rs lib that uses the pkgs.deploy-rs from nixpkgs.¹ Will probably make a PR down the line when I get more time.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/imsofi/phenix/commit/cd783955449e299eea7eec45c64126ba5dd82657 ↩