Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

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79 pointsagnishom28 comments

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Congrats to the team!

To all Garnix users: NixCI is very similar so I'd like to welcome you to try it out.

Demo: https://nix-ci.com/demo

Comparison: https://nix-ci.com/comparison/garnix

Was looking for an alternative myself but seems like there's no free tier? (Garnix had a rather generous one.)

I don't mind self hosting the workers (because my use cases are just in my homelab) but I need to contact you for that? Why isn't that just openly documented?

Note that Garnix is more than a CI system. It also allows for hosting apps with a quite brilliant and AFAIK unique solution to interdependencies. https://garnix.io/blog/call-by-hash/

Was this named by a German? "Gar nichts", pronounced as "Gar Nix", means "absolutely nothing".

One team member is named Sönke Hahn, so it seems likely.

At least for Nix itself, that's pretty much it except via Dutch.

> The name Nix is derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing; build actions do not see anything that has not been explicitly declared as an input

From page 81 of the original paper: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

That's surprising; nix is Latin for snow, and its logo is a snow flake, so I just assumed it was that.

I don't think the logo choice is a coincidence, either; it's just that the ordering is different.

Also, I think the founder's username in various places is nixnut. Which to an English-only speaker means someone crazy about Nix (Nix fan). However in Dutch 'niksnut' or 'nietsnut' loosely translates to 'bum'.

"gar" is a useful amplifying prefix in German that can be used in all kinds of situations and I think it lacks a direct equivalent in English. Unlike totally, for example, gar can only stand alone in very specific contexts and usually is used more like an intensifying prefix.

So garnix would be the total and utter nothing.

For the lazy: bought by Shopify, apparently

good for the team, bad for the community.

Yeah. I'm happy for them. But I'm also sad, because clouds are awful in terms of the way they handle state, and Garnix was paving the way towards something better.

but the community still gets the source code, kudos to the Garnix team!

Good point. Really graceful way to transition, and it definitely offsets the loss. Maybe in some ways it'll end up being a net gain, who knows?

Back to Nix again? I remember one of their employees had a great video series on it, but then they stopped using it because it was too complicated.

Yeah, they gave a talk about it at NixCon last year:

https://talks.nixcon.org/nixcon-2025/talk/UPHTPD/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzjKCIqUVk

I don't remember all of the details, so if you're curious you should watch the talk. :)

But IIRC the main points that differentiated this new effort from the old one were that (1) there was buy-in from the very top of the company, (2) they took a more incremental approach where the old one was more all-or-nothing, and (3) they tackled the edge cases and hardest repos first.

The talk includes some info about the failings of their first effort as well. It's worth a watch.

Oops, I linked to the original (2019) talk above. Here's the new one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogW7UL1Jxm4

Garnix was one of the interesting, declarative ones. We need more of these.

Luckily they seem to have open-sourced it [0], so it should still be able to serve this use case, and help others develop in the future.

[0]: https://github.com/garnix-io/garnix-ci

Hate to see it, but glad they're at open-sourcing it.

Tobi loves Nix.

truth

This is surprising.

I would have thought this would be a commercially viable business.

Such a bummer.

Presumably it was and they got acqui-hired.

All clouds / serverless will end up like this. It's a matter of "when", not "if"

Agreed. Not gonna lie, I am upset and angry to see small companies disappear and be eaten up by larger ones. But I praise them for not building in any vendor lock-in. And I also appreciate them for open-sourcing their toolchain

Yeh... This month has been especially tough. I'm both a customer of cirrus labs (now bought up by OpenAI) and garnix (now bought up by Shopify) and I'm scared that whatever competitor I switch to is also just gonna get bought out.

Now I have two CI providers to replace by the end of the Quarter

Sigh

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