NixOS / NixOS/nix.dev

A collection "How do I ..." cookbook style recipes

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Nix
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Description

For the task I am currently working on I really need to install https://github.com/aurora/rmate on my NixOS server. It's a simple bash script so I can just wget and chmod +x it, but that feels icky. I want to have it in my configuration.nix so I can use it in the future too.

After considerable Googling I didn't find a tutorial on how to "package a bash script from the Internet". Here it is, this is what you dump into configuration.nix:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
  rmate_src = pkgs.fetchurl {
      url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aurora/rmate/master/rmate";
      sha256 = "152z31xhdq9w0mn9ibv9jsnc2k1p36yr23waa6376d8m05hpmaln";
      executable = true;
    };
  rmate = pkgs.writeShellScriptBin "rmate" ''${rmate_src} "$@"''; 
  
in
{
...
environment.systemPackages = [ rmate ];
}

It would be nice if nix.dev had a section where we could collect quick recipes like this one.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Use the rmate packaging example in the issue as the starting material, then determine where a cookbook section belongs in the documentation. Done means adding a reviewed, usable recipe for packaging a downloaded Bash script and making it easy to find alongside similar quick recipes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
bash
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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