Building PDF documents via Sphinx depends of LaTeX being available, this resulted in quite heavy container images which took also very long to build. Out of curiosity I tested to build a minimal Texlive environment based on Nix and got surprisingly nice results, both the image size and the build time dropped significantly.

Small snippet how to run a command with a few extra dependencies inside of the environment in an ad-hoc fashion.

NixOS allows to easily build images of a machine configuration. This post shows in an example how to build a more recent version of the base image which NixOPS uses to spin off Virtualbox based machines. The idea should be applicable to all kinds of machine configurations.

Quick note about the attribute "defaults" in a NixOPS network description.

When experimenting with NixOS containers, it is sometimes quite nice to just build the container derivation and inspect the result. Being able to use the remote building features makes this even more convenient.

A quick example about how to use the library function remove to adjust a package's dependencies based on a given condition.

Quick note about the needed bits to get remote building for Nix into a working state on OSX.

My personal collection of Nix related jokes in German. Can't help myself, I still like those ;)

Quick hints on getting your node2nix based environment updated for recent versions of nixpkgs.

Upgrading old NixOS machines can lead to a situation where the rebuild fails due to an unknown hash algorithm. This post shows a workaround to get started again.