Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell

Packaging Supabase with Nix

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2024-04-25 19:00:01

Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell — they are built by functions that don’t have side-effects, and they never change after they have been built. Nix stores packages in the Nix store, usually the directory /nix/store, where each package has its own unique sub-directory such as

where b6gvzjyb2pg0… is a unique identifier for the package that captures all its dependencies (it’s a cryptographic hash of the package’s build dependency graph). This enables many powerful features.

The implications of purely functional builds are too far reaching to fully explore here, but the key properties we’re excited about are:

Over time the Supabase Platform has grown up. We started with Postgres, PostgREST and Realtime. Next came Auth, and Storage, then GraphQL, and Functions. Postgres itself also has a suite of independently versioned extensions that we maintain and periodically upgrade.

As the constraints from the various tools in our stack combined it became impractical to run builds on local development machines. To accommodate, we pushed all builds to consistent build machines on CI. Today those builds take between 30-60 minutes. Given some of the larger components we bake in, like PL/v8, we’re fairly happy with that runtime. Even so, we can do better!