nix-serve is a small utility to serve a Nix store as a binary cache,
allowing it to be used as a substituter by other Nix installations.
The instructions below assume a flake-enabled version of Nix.
To start nix-serve, serving a binary cache on port 5000 of localhost:
# nix run github:edolstra/nix-serve
You can test whether the server works by running
# nix store ping --store http://localhost:5000
You can then pass --substituters http://localhost:5000/ to Nix to
use this binary cache as a substituter.
nix-serve user the Starman web server. See the starman
documentation
for additional flags you can pass, e.g.
# nix run github:edolstra/nix-serve -- --access-log /dev/stderr
It's possible to sign the binary cache. First create a key pair:
# nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key cache.example.org-1 ./secret ./public
# cat public
cache.example.org-1:l24SFecAdWV31HIN8jqFAYpCMFyreZizab3HJ3KFEgQ=
Then run the server as follows:
# NIX_SECRET_KEY_FILE=./secret nix run ...
To check whether signing and signature verification works, do:
# nix verify --store http://localhost:5000 \
--trusted-public-keys 'cache.example.org-1:l24SFecAdWV31HIN8jqFAYpCMFyreZizab3HJ3KFEgQ=' \
/nix/store/...
where /nix/store/... is one or more store paths served by your binary cache.