Nix for Monorepos

30 min · developers

At alugha, all development happens in a monorepo with many different packages and services in different programming languages. Managing CI pipelines for such a setup can be tricky and is often solved with a solution like Google's Bazel. Another alternative that has been gaining traction in recent years is Nix - the declarative package manager based on a pure, functional programming language. We use Nix to build all our packages and their dependencies in isolation, paving the way for granular caching. In the final step, Nix also allows us to build Docker-compatible OCI container images from these packages without ever entering a container runtime.