forked from lix-project/lix
51 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
# Serving a Nix store via HTTP
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You can easily share the Nix store of a machine via HTTP. This allows
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other machines to fetch store paths from that machine to speed up
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installations. It uses the same *binary cache* mechanism that Nix
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usually uses to fetch pre-built binaries from <https://cache.nixos.org>.
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The daemon that handles binary cache requests via HTTP, `nix-serve`, is
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not part of the Nix distribution, but you can install it from Nixpkgs:
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```console
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$ nix-env -i nix-serve
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```
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You can then start the server, listening for HTTP connections on
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whatever port you like:
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```console
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$ nix-serve -p 8080
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```
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To check whether it works, try the following on the client:
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```console
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$ curl http://avalon:8080/nix-cache-info
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```
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which should print something like:
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StoreDir: /nix/store
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WantMassQuery: 1
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Priority: 30
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On the client side, you can tell Nix to use your binary cache using
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`--option extra-binary-caches`, e.g.:
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```console
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$ nix-env -i firefox --option extra-binary-caches http://avalon:8080/
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```
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The option `extra-binary-caches` tells Nix to use this binary cache in
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addition to your default caches, such as <https://cache.nixos.org>.
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Thus, for any path in the closure of Firefox, Nix will first check if
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the path is available on the server `avalon` or another binary caches.
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If not, it will fall back to building from source.
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You can also tell Nix to always use your binary cache by adding a line
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to the `nix.conf` configuration file like this:
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binary-caches = http://avalon:8080/ https://cache.nixos.org/
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