📦 Nixta

A package manager based on Nix

Nix is a superbly well designed and powerful cross-platform package manager. But it's also got a very steep learning curve. Even for experienced programmers it can be daunting to use.

Nixta is a thin, sugary wrapper around Nix to make it sweeter to use 🍭! It takes a JSON (or YAML) definition of a reproducible computing Environment and builds a Nix environment for it.

Status

💀: Nixta was started in 2018 as an experiment into what an easier interface to Nix might look like - with a focus on reproducible data science. There are now, in 2024, several projects with similar aims that are much further along (and Nix flakes are now a thing). So it's well time to archive this repo.

If you are here, and you haven't already, you'll probably want to check out:

• devbox
• devenv
• flox

Demo

Note: This demo uses the previous name for this tool, "Nixster".

Install

Nixta is available as a pre-built, standalone command line tool, a Node package, or in Docker image.

For the command line tool and the Node package you will also need to have Nix installed:

curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Command line tool

Linux

To install the latest release of the nixta command line tool to ~/.local/bin/ just use,

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stencila/nixta/master/install.sh | bash

To install a specific version, append -s vX.X.X e.g.

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stencila/nixta/master/install.sh | bash -s v0.1.1

Or, if you'd prefer to do things manually, or place Nixta elewhere, download nixta-linux-x64.tar.gz for the latest release, and then

tar xvf nixta-linux-x64.tar.gz # unzip the download
sudo mkdir -p /user/local/bin/nixta-v0.1.1 # create a directory for it
sudo mv -f nixta /user/local/bin/nixta-v0.1.1 # move it there
sudo ln -sf nixta-v0.1.1/nixta /user/local/bin/nixta # create a link to the executable
sudo nixta --version # run once to setup necessary files and folders

MacOS and Windows

Binaries are not yet available.

Node package

Currently you will need to install the package via this repo (not yet published to NPM):

git clone git@github.com:stencila/nixta.git
cd nixta
npm install

To test the CLI more conveniently you can add an alias to your shell e.g.

alias nixta='npx ts-node src/cli.ts'

Or, if you want to use the CLI outside of this directory:

alias nixta='/path/to/nixta/node_modules/.bin/ts-node --project /path/to/nixta/tsconfig.json /path/to/nixta/src/cli.ts'

Docker image

Instead of installing Nix and Nixta you can use the stencila/nixta Docker image:

make docker docker-interact