[ANN] Nixtamal: Fulfilling Input Pinning for Nix

Ecosystem
1

Nixtamal is my first serious OCaml project release, now at verison 1.1.4. It was created as a reaction to the lack of features I wanted from its “competitors” niv & npins while additionally covering features Nix flakes never could support given it’s rigid design philosophy which has more drawbacks than folks initially realize. I have been using it on all projects for a couple months now & had at least a couple folks I didn’t know prior try it out providing feedback & bug reports.

Key features:

  • Automate the manual work of input pinning for dependency management
  • Allow easy ways to lock & refresh those inputs
  • Declarative KDL manifest file over imperative CLI flags
  • Host, forge, VCS-agnostic
  • Choose eval time fetchers (builtins) or build time fetchers (Nixpkgs, default) — which opens up fetching now-supported Darcs, Pijul, & Fossil
  • Supports mirrors (on kinds that support mirrors)
  • Override hash algorithm on a per-project & per-input basis — including BLAKE3 support (which does require enabling blake3-hashes to opt in)
  • Custom freshness commands (avoid refetching massive inputs just to check the hash hasn’t changed)
  • No experimental Nix features required (flakes)

Outside the homepage, it would be worth checking the FAQs if any whats or whys come up.

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