heroku-buildpack-nix-proot

DEPRECATION WARNING:

This repo is left up for historical interest, but is presently unmaintained. If you are interested in this approach, I suggest you check out ocharles' fork which uses Hydra in lieu of S3 for cached binaries.

This buildpack installs dependencies using the Nix package manager. Nix has a binary cache of many dependencies (including GHC and many Haskell libraries), with the potential to greatly accelerate the build process.

The resulting app must be run within PRoot, incurring a performance penalty. An Amazon Web Services account with an S3 Bucket is also required, as the buildpack must save and restore the Nix closure in order to install. (Note that for Haskell apps using larger frameworks like Yesod, this may be over 1.5 GB; make sure that your S3 bucket is in the same region as the dyno to take advantage of free data transfer.)

Usage

Create a Procfile something like this (run_proot.sh will be created by the build scripts):

web: run_proot.sh myapp

Then create your application on Heroku, setting the S3 access info as follows:

heroku create -b https://github.com/corajr/heroku-buildpack-nix-proot.git
heroku config:set NIX_S3_KEY=... \
                  NIX_S3_SECRET=... \
                  NIX_S3_BUCKET=...

The default behavior is to have the first git push heroku master set up Nix in the build cache and create a build environment, but not to build. If you want Nix to attempt a complete build on push, also set:

heroku config:set NIX_BUILD_ON_PUSH=1

(Simply unset it to turn off. Build on push is not recommended for the first push of a larger app, as it may exceed the 15-minute build limit.)

Then push the app:

git push heroku master

If you've specified to build on push above, nix will try to install your app. Otherwise, run a build command on a one-off dyno like so:

heroku run --size=PX build

Then re-deploy the app:

git commit --amend --no-edit
git push -f heroku master

See https://github.com/corajr/heroku-deploy-nix-example for a trivial complete example.

Refs

This approach is heavily inspired by Miëtek Bak's Haskell on Heroku, simply using Nix instead of Halcyon for installation.

Credit to Brian McKenna for the idea of a Nix buildpack.

The Nix install script is derived from the PRoot instructions on the Nix wiki.

Finally, this buildpack uses Tim Kay's AWS tool to communicate with S3.