I have a curiosity you may be able to help me indulge.
I’m planning on giving an in-person 1 training to colleagues to aid in their adoption and productive use of nix.
In my experience, these kinds of trainings succeed when they have clear structure and real-world practical examples and the like.
Before I go hacking on my own curricula, I’m curious if y’all know of any freely licensed ones out there?
If not, I intend to license whatever I stumble upon freely.
That’s what nix.dev is supposed to be. We‘re not terribly far with writing the actual tutorials yet, but here’s the curriculum so far: Tutorials overview · Issue #572 · NixOS/nix.dev · GitHub
Feel free to hook into that, help is greatly appreciated! The most sought-after topics according to Google Search Console are building container (Docker) images and setting up language-specific development environments. What seems not to be on most people‘s radar, I suppose because it’s so underexposed, are declarative user environments and in particular editor (vim, VScode) configuration.
There is a few resources that might be interesting to you, but nothing in the 1 hours format afaik
I suggest the Nix Hour.
The only issue is that some of it is a bit overwhelming for beginners, but if you check out the titles and Github issues you may find topics you need. You can also make references to relevant videos.
A quick reflection on what I ended up doing and how it went.
My intent was to use and contribute to the open documentation of nix. As such, @fricklerhandwerk’s point about nix.dev’s purpose led me to pick one of the guides there and use it for training.
I chose the package existing software with nix as my general guide: https://nix.dev/tutorials/packaging-existing-software
The skeleton derivation syntax example proved immensely useful. I was able to introduce folks to functions in nix.
Overall the introduction went well. Time flew as I also tacked on creating this as part of a GitLab workflow.
I felt it worked well for a general guide if you are comfortable with nix basics and introducing others to new technologies in practice.
@efx thanks a lot for the feedback! More of that is always highly appreciated, we can probably still improve a lot. @proofconstruction wrote the packaging tutorial by the way.
@efx Thanks for the feedback! I’d love to see your notes on the GitLab workflow stuff; that could be a useful contribution to nix.dev along the lines of Continuous integration with GitHub Actions — nix.dev documentation.
Sure thing! I did most verbally but perhaps I could write up a recipe for GitLab + simple nix packaging of a shell script.
In short we:
.gitlab-ci.yml
nix-build to the .gitlab-ci.yml’s script value