The Nix Build Farm: A Declarative Approach to Continuous Integration

The paper is the first to come out of the 3TU CEDICT buildfarm project (which badly needs a webpage).

Abstract: There are many tools to support continuous integration (the process of automatically and continuously building a project from a version management repository). However, they do not have good support for variability in the build environment: dependencies such as compilers, libraries or testing tools must typically be installed manually on all machines on which automated builds are performed. The Nix package manager solves this problem: it has a purely functional language for describing package build actions and their dependencies, allowing the build environment for projects to be produced automatically and deterministically. We have used Nix to build a continuous integration tool, the Nix build farm, that is in use to continuously build and release a large set of projects.