Hacker News Reader

Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Nix isn't a good option for developing rails applications. The nix ecosystem doesn't have good support for ruby meaning you will waste a lot of time and run into a lot of issues getting stuff to work. That's not boring. An example of being boring would be using Nix for something like C where the ecosystem around it is already built up.

I was really pro Nix at the time I took on a rails project and it caused many problems for my team due to Nix just not having good support for my use case. If I could go back in time I would definitely choose something else.

View on HN

Please check out https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/109 !

I absolutely agree language-specific package managers need better support. Nix RFC 109 is a simple-stupid way to get some "important from derivation" in Nixpkgs, so we can collectively dogfood them "lang2nix" tools and finally make them good.

It is really sad to me that many users understandly think "hmm, C is crazy, surely this Nix should be even better with more uniform language ecosystems packages!", only to die on the hell of the lang2nixs all being just not quite good enough. This is huge stumbling block for developement shops that try to use Nix that I want to see removed!

What was the problem you were having with Ruby (on Rails) and Nix? It wasn't ergonomic for me, but I was able to get things to work.

I think one of the main issues was depending on a custom gem. And then something about sandboxing, and outdated things being cached (maybe this was just a rails thing though). Also setting up rails project was convoluted. It was just obvious that there wasn't much time devoted towards that use case of Nix.

The rails support was more of just to handle packaging existing software as opposed to being good for a development environment.

What do you mean exactly? At the end of the day, rails is just a collection of ruby gems. If nix has first class support for ruby and Gemfiles in theory there shouldn't be a ton of problems.

I've not used Nix so I legitimately don't know (but I am quite interested in it)

I don't remember exactly the problem since it was a couple years ago. There was a lot of issues in regards to failing to run / build rails which regarded doing special nix stuff to fix. It wasn't possible to include a custom gem from a separate directory. I had to disable some sort of sandboxing to prevent Nix from complaining. Nix kept getting in my way and as my team members were not familiar with Nix they couldn't fix it themselves. Sadly, I ruined their opinion of Nix by showing them it with this project.

There are no fundamentals hurdles, but because we are currently prevented from properly dogfooding these tools in Nixpkgs, they tend to be unpolished in various ways, they are just used to by a few random projects in relative isolation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com