Nix package version search

See the frontend for this project at RikudouSage/NixPackageHistoryFrontend.

This is a backend for searching previous versions of nix packages, similar to lazamar/nix-package-versions. Except that one stopped working for me, so I made this one.

This project consists of two main parts: updater command and a simple JSON controller.

Before you can do any of the below, you must install dependencies using composer install.

Tip: If you're using nix, you can get all dependencies using nix-shell with the shell.nix from this repo

Setting up database

Before you can do anything, you must setup the database. By default the project uses SQLite database located at var/database.db.

You can change it by providing your own path by overriding the env variable DATABASE_URL (you can also create a file called .env.local in this project and put the environment variable there).

Some examples:

DATABASE_URL="sqlite:///%kernel.project_dir%/var/database.db" # the default value, %kernel.project_dir% gets replaced by the path to project
DATABASE_URL="mysql://user:password@127.0.0.1:3306/database?serverVersion=8.0.32&charset=utf8mb4"
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@127.0.0.1:5432/database?serverVersion=15&charset=utf8"

As a next step you need to migrate the database. If you're using SQLite, you can just use the provided migrations, otherwise you need to generate them as well:

• ./bin/console doctrine:migrations:diff (skip this if you're using SQLite)
• ./bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate -n

Setting up file storage

If you don't want to transfer large amounts of data (like list of all packages) from your applicaton server, you can change USE_STORAGE to 1 and S3_BUCKET to the name of the bucket that will store the cached packages.

Updater

The updater parses information from the official nixpkgs repo.

You don't need to do any of the following if you only want to use the http endpoints with an existing database.

Usage

First you need to clone the repo, it doesn't matter where you clone it:

git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

As a next step, create an environment variable PATH_TO_NIXPKGS and use the path to the repo as a value (you can also create a file called .env.local in this project and put the environment variable there).

PATH_TO_NIXPKGS=/home/my-username/some/path/to/nixpkgs

Afterwards, you can run the command:

• ./bin/console app:parse-packages

Without any parameters it will parse every single commit which might get a little noisy (and very slow).

You can customize the behavior using these parameters:

• --start-at <commit-ref> - the commit reference to start at, defaults to HEAD
• --skip - the amount of days to skip when parsing, meaning it will parse packages from a commit only if it's older than the specified amount of days compared to the last imported commit
• --stop-at - the date and time that is the oldest allowed for import

The command will traverse all available commits and extract package name and version, along with the information about which revision contains the version. This will be stored in the database.

Note that the nix-env command is used to get information about packages, meaning you need to run this on an OS with nix installed.

HTTP endpoints

A set of simple endpoints for getting information from the database.

Usage

For development you can run the dev server using symfony server:start command (from the symfony-cli).

Tip: If you're using nix, you can get all dependencies using nix-shell with the shell.nix from this repo

For production you can use any of the available http servers, like apache with php module, or apache/nginx/caddy with php-fpm (or any other webserver capable of communicating using fpm).

Endpoints

For endpoint description see the provided openapi.yaml.