Static site, Nix flakes and GitLab

I was preparing a technical talk but later discarded it because I decided it wouldn’t have enough depth. Following are my notes from that.

Title:

Over-engineer your blog with Nix flakes, IaC (i.e. infrastructure as code) and CI/CD

Description:

Imagine you have a simple system that works with a handful of CLI commands and a few clicks on a cloud provider’s console. What happens if you tinker a little too much? Well, you could transform it into a declaratively defined and fully reproducible system that employs CI/CD.

This talk will introduce you to Nix package manager through a practical use case. Specifically, it’ll show how you can develop a website locally through a static-site generator like Hugo and deploy it for free on GitLab Pages.

• Nix concepts:
  • Umbrella of projects, all similarly named:
    • Nix as package manager.
      • Purely functional package manager.
    • NixOS.
    • Nix language.
    • Nixpkgs.
  • Why Nix?
    • Reproducible.
    • Declarative.
    • Reliable.
    • Vibrant community.
• Overall things to cover:
  • Nix flakes.
  • Hugo.
  • GitLab pages, with custom domains maybe.
• What a regular system looks like? (Hugo CLI installed through Home Brew, Netlify console etc.)
• Why do it?
  • No good reason if your current setup works.
  • Benefits:
    • No need for Git submodules.
    • No need to separately manage Hugo versions - such as, ensuring version locally is same as on Netlify.
    • Reproducible?
• How to update the dependencies later.

Notes:

• CI - continuous maybe misleading.
• Show before tell?
  • Start with the problem. Problem driven.
  • Spend time on complexity.
  • Cross-technology? Across Java, Python etc.