#05 - Tonight We Ride

The 17.03 “Gorilla” release has been tagged! There are too many good things in this release to pick favourites. I refer you to the release notes instead.

Some fun stats:

  • ~ 900 new packages since 16.09
  • ~ 80 new contributors (very inexact science this)
  • ~ 60 new services

News

Reading

  • One long-standing issue in Nix has been the storage of secrets. Right now many of our services store their secrets in /nix where they are world readable. This means you can’t have root-only secrets, multi-user systems are problematic, and if one of your services is compromised it can be used to steal all your other secrets. Eelco created an RFC for encrypting secrets at rest.
  • Monte is a dynamic language inspired by Python and E. It uses Nix, under the hook, for its packaging. Worth checking out if you are writing a new languge and want to see how Nix help you.
  • A Gentle Introduction to the Nix Family by Rommel Martinez.

Meetups

  • Apr 4, 2017, NixOS April Meetup, Dublin, Ireland

    Two presentations:

    • Immutable deployments in Rapid7 by Ulrich Dangel
    • Basics of Nix by Kevin Cox
  • (Future) Let us know if you are organizing a Nix / NixOS event.

Editor’s corner

A substantial part of the effort of publishing the “weekly” news is collecting the news in the first place. If you see anything cool, want to share a job, meetup or presentation add a comment with your item at https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-weekly. It’s super helpful!