Nix & Reproducibility

“It works on my machine, but fails in CI.” To solve this classic problem, Aether Platform leverages Nix.

The “Works on My Machine” Problem

Traditional Dockerfile-based approaches have limits. Running apt-get update at different times can install different package versions, and base image updates can introduce breaking changes silently.

Why Nix?

Nix is a purely functional package manager. Aether’s workspace definition file (dev.nix) guarantees:

Declarative: Explicitly define tools and versions.
Immutable: Once built, the environment is frozen with cryptographic hashes of all dependencies.
Isolated: No dependency conflicts. You can safely coexist Python 3.8 and 3.11.

dev.nix Configuration

Simply place dev.nix in your project root, and Aether builds the environment automatically.

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

pkgs.mkShell {
  packages = [
    pkgs.python311
    pkgs.nodejs_20
    pkgs.poetry
    pkgs.ripgrep
  ];

  shellHook = ''
    echo "Welcome to Aether Environment!"
    poetry install
  '';
}

Binary Caching Strategy

While Nix builds can be compute-intensive, Aether solves this:

Global Cache: Common packages (Node.js, Python, Rust) are served instantly as binaries from Aether’s global cache.
Project Cache: Project-specific builds are also cached and shared among team members and CI. This dramatically speeds up npm install or cargo build.