nix-build-cache

nix-build-cache extends stdenv.mkDerivation based builds with a distributed build cache. Many build tools produce intermediate files as part of a build, and if these intermediate files are present for subsequent build, steps of the build can be eliminated. nix-build-cache manages these files in a somewhat impure manner, to avoid the output hash changing. Essentially, these build cache files are purely optimisations and as such shouldn't impact the resulting output.

Usage

nix-build-cache is a function of the following type:

{ aws-key : Text
, aws-secret : Text
, pkgs : Nixpkgs
, cache-name : Text
, master-cache : Text
, cache-dirs : List Text
, s3-bucket : Text
} -> stdenv.mkDerivation-result -> stdenv.mkDeriavtion-result

where Nixpkgs is the object that you'd get from import <nixpkgs> {}, and stdenv.mkDerivation-result is the result of a well-formed call to stdenv.mkDerivation. To use nix-build-cache, supply the configuration object and a build that you wish to add a cache to. For example, here's how we can add a build cache to a build of Aeson:

let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
    add-build-cache = 
      import 
        ./nix-build-cache.nix 
        {  
          inherit pkgs;
          aws-key = "xxx";
          aws-secret = "xxx";
          cache-name = "aeson";
          master-cache = "aeson";
          cache-dirs = [ "dist" ];
          s3-bucket = "aeson-build";
        };

in add-build-cache pkgs.haskellPackages.aeson

The parameters supplied to nix-build-cache are:

• aws-key: An AWS key
• aws-secret-key: An AWS secret key
• pkgs: A nixpkgs repository. Used to call things like mktemp and aws.
• cache-name: The name of the cache for this build. A combination of a Git repository name and a Git branch name is a good choice here.
• master-cache: The name of a fallback cache, if the cache under cache-name can't be found. If you're building GitHub pull requests, this means the first build can resume from the master cache.
• cache-dirs: Which directories to add to the cache after the build completes. For Haskell projects, you will want to use [ "dist" ], and for Elm projects [ "elm-stuff" ].
• s3-bucket: The name of the S3 bucket to upload the cache to.

How nix-build-cache Works

nix-build-cache augments a build by adding some extra steps to preConfigure and preInstall.

In preConfigure, we first generate an MD5 hash of all files in the source tree. Next, we attempt to download either cache-name or master-cache from S3, and unpack it. This build cache is expected to contain a file - MD5SUMS - which contains the MD5 hash of all source files that produced the cache. We join the current MD5 hashes against these hashes, and work out which have changed. Any changed files are then touched to update their timestamp. Finally, all artifacts in the build cache are touched to be two hours in the past. This is an arbitrary time difference, but it's important the build cache files look they were produced before the changed files were changed.

In preInstall, we simply tar up the directories mentioned in cache-dirs and upload this tarball to cache-name.

Limitations

This approach relies on builds having network access.