duijf · HackerTrans

> It's just that function calls can only appear in very limited places in the program (only inside `steps`), and to define a function, you have to create a Git repository.

FYI there is also `on: workflow_call` which you can use to define reusable jobs. You don't have to create a new repository for these

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/writing-workflows/workflo...

duijf

2 years agodiscuss

All the Nix commands that take an 'installable' can take GitHub URLs. For instance:

    $ nix run github:NixOS/nixpkgs#hello
    Hello world!

That command will download nixpkgs from GitHub, evaluate the `hello` flake attribute, build it (or download it from a cache), and run it.

> But to find out what the flake exposes at all, reading the flake (or its documentation) is pretty much necessary.

If the flake exposes default packages or apps, then you do not need to provide a flake attribute:

    $ nix run github:NixOS/nixpkgs
    error: flake 'github:NixOS/nixpkgs' does not provide attribute 'apps.aarch64-darwin.default', 'defaultApp.aarch64-darwin', 'packages.aarch64-darwin.default' or 'defaultPackage.aarch64-darwin'

So you can run e.g. Alejandra [1], a Nix formatter, like so:

    $ nix run github:kamadorueda/alejandra

[1]: https://github.com/kamadorueda/alejandra

EDIT: For what it's worth, I think this feature can be useful sometimes, but it does also suffer from the same typosquatting problems as we see in other ecosystems.

duijf

2 years agodiscuss

Wow it's great seeing this here again.

The first uni assignment I made for CS101 was a Mandelbrot set renderer. I got it to work, but that's all the merit it had. I didn't have a clue about what I was actually doing.

When I read this post a couple of months later it answered questions I didn't even know I had. Ever since, I try to keep digging if I have that feeling of "There must be more to this.."

comments