Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

The quick answer of the question &quot;Why this project makes a sense ?&quot; is following:<p>Nix is solving the principal problems of software building, distribution, deployment, configuration, supply chain security and many others in very elegant but unique way. It also comes with plenty of other unique features which doesn&#x27;t exist anywhere else. The cost of this is quite steep learning and adoption curve.<p>geospatial-nix.today is lowering those bariers to minimum.<p>Why we narrowed our scope to geospatial software and services ?<p>Nixpkgs - the software collection built by Nix is the largest software repository on the planet, containing around 80 000 packages. You can use any of those packages via geospatial-nix, but geo software and services gets additional level of QA and maintenance. Also, we want to provide other extra features which make a sense if you are geo user or developer. I believe that we can provide higher added value if we concentrate our effort to one domain.

geospatial-nix author here. Thanks for your interest.<p>geospatial-nix.today is the UI for creation of development and working environments using Nix. It provides easy instructions to get Nix running on your Linux machine, UI to declaratively configure your environment and tools for building container images.<p>We are focusing on geospatial use cases, but this tool is not limited to geospatial only. We support all configuration options provided by Devenv (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devenv.sh&#x2F;reference&#x2F;options&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devenv.sh&#x2F;reference&#x2F;options&#x2F;</a>). Actually, geospatial-nix.today website, written in Elm, is developed and deployed by the environment created by geospatial-nix (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix.today&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;geonix.nix">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix.today&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;...</a>)<p>geospatial-nix (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix</a>) itself is weekly updated geospatial software repository for Linux.<p>As you can read in the FUTURE PLANS section, we are in very early stage of development. Please take this to account. Features like support for many more services, Mac support, production deployment to Kubernetes will land soon.<p>Any feedback is very much appreciated.

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix.<p>I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I&#x27;ve been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json&#x2F;csv&#x2F;parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;felt&#x2F;tippecanoe">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;felt&#x2F;tippecanoe</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;protomaps&#x2F;PMTiles">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;protomaps&#x2F;PMTiles</a><p>Tippecanoe would be a great addition to your nix packages. I&#x27;ve been thinking more and more about how Nix could fit into this pipeline.<p>Great work!

I have zero clue as to what these nixos services&#x2F;nix packages do. The blurb on the site is not informative at all.

Interesting and useful work, keep it up.<p>However, I took a look at a few geospatial-nix packages:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pkgs&#x2F;postgis&#x2F;postgis.nix">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pkgs&#x2F;p...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pkgs&#x2F;geos&#x2F;tests.nix">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imincik&#x2F;geospatial-nix&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pkgs&#x2F;g...</a><p>But it seems like the packages are minimally tested.<p>Am I seeing this correctly?<p>For example, with postgis, I miss the &#x27;make check&#x27;;<p><i>&quot;The above command will run through various checks and regression tests using the generated library against an actual PostgreSQL database.&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postgis.net&#x2F;docs&#x2F;postgis_installation.html#idm738" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postgis.net&#x2F;docs&#x2F;postgis_installation.html#idm738</a>

&gt; In a world of horrendously complex software developed by myriads of authors, be smart, use Nix<p>I mean, Nix is pretty complex software, and is an added layer of abstraction in many contexts. Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim.<p>What Nix can help with, imo, is reducing toil. And a good abstraction maintained by a team can reduce toil for a lot of others.

I used Conda to install QGIS and a compatible set of plugins. But that’s python-specific and this works for packages in other languages, so I’ve bookmarked it.