Ergo Nix Toolkit

This repository provides Nix derivations for packages and services of the Ergo ecosystem.

Key Features • Installation • Usage

Why Nix?

There are many existing systems for software configuration and most of them are far more user friendly than Nix. However, I feel like Nix is the best available tool to build immutable and pure (as in functional programming) Infrastructure as a Code, which is so important in the FinTech world.

The way Nix calculates whether a derivation input has changed is by taking its cryptographic hash. Dependencies are recursive, so this hash is actually a hash of hashes — a powerful concept instantly recognizable to blockchain enthusiasts. If any of the inputs change, so does the result and therefore we end up with a totally different software package.

Key Features

Packages

• ergo-node
  • provides the Ergo blockchain nodes
• ergo-explorer-backend
  • provides Ergo explorer backend tooling (chain-grabber, explorer-api and utx-{watcher,broadcaster})
• ergo-explorer-frontend
  • provides the Ergo explorer web interface

Services

• services.ergo-node

Installation

If you are not running NixOS, you need to at least install Nix

$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

After installing Nix, add the following to /etc/nix/nix.conf to take advantage of the cache, so you do not have to rebuild everything. After adding it, you need to restart the nix-daemon service.

substituters         = https://cache.nixos.org https://ergo-nix.cachix.org
trusted-public-keys  = cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY= ergo-nix.cachix.org-1:5T2FPh0TfxXqrMYAwf/VGDycBW6Dy/W/L6I3DFhc1iQ=

If you are using NixOS, you probably know how to add these as your binary caches.

Usage

Software Packages

You can add it as a channel.

$ nix-channel --add https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo-nix/archive/master.tar.gz ergo-nix
$ nix-channel --update
unpacking channels...

$ nix-env -iA ergo-nix.ergo-node
installing 'ergo-node-3.3.6'

Or you can just use it directly as a Nix path.

$ nix-env -iA ergo-node -f https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo-nix/archive/master.tar.gz
unpacking 'https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo-nix/archive/master.tar.gz'...
installing 'ergo-node-3.3.6'

Software services

It is also possible to directly use the NixOS services, that will take care of the configuration.

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let

  # Import the Ergo Nix toolkit repository
  ergo-nix = builtins.fetchTarball {
    url = "https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo-nix/archive/6a5f1da142f6cb292623967b48b43b84d5f8ebff.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "0dkrzy6hp1b1xd307klgmi02s0g2yqic5jxl1m08vmbg4g86l4x6";
  };

in {

  # Import the Ergo nix services from the repository above
  imports = (import "${ergo-nix}/nixos");

  # Enable the Ergo node service
  services.ergo-node.enable = true;
}