A while back I mentioned that I created a macos-builder project for easily creating Linux builders out of thin air on macOS.
I needed that as a foundational piece for a work project (so that we can runNixOS tests on macOS) so I spent today upstreaming that project into Nixpkgs, which you can find here:
Once that's merged, you'll be able to launch the builder on macOS as easily as this:
$ nix run nixpkgs#darwin.builder
β¦ which is pretty slick! 1
The main benefit of upstreaming this into Nixpkgs is so that Nixpkgs can build and cache the Linux builder. The caching is the really important part of the entire project because that's how it's able to bypass the chicken-and-egg problem of bootstrapping the Linux builder on macOS machines that don't already have access to a Linux builder.
Previously if you used my personal macos-builder you had to trust the Linux cache products that I uploaded. Not that I'm untrustworthy π but it's easier for end users to trust cache products built by Nixpkgs because there is a clearer and stronger chain of trust.
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Okay, there's one other step to update your
nix.conffile, but it's still a very streamlined UX