Packaging a Haskell library for artefact evaluation using nix

Posted on September 19, 2018

This year I packaged two artefacts for the ICFP artefact evaluation process. This post explains the system I used to make it easy to produce the docker images using nix. I hope this documentation will be useful for anyone else submitting a Haskell library for evaluation.

The end result will be an artefact.nix file which is used to build a docker image to submit. It will be an entirely reproducible process as we will fix the versions of all the dependencies we use.

The structure of the artefact

In this example, I am going to package the artefact from the paper “Generic Deriving of Generic Traversals”. The artefact was a Haskell library and an executable which ran some benchmarks. The resulting artefact will be a docker image which contains:

1. The source code of the library
2. The source code for the benchmarks
3. The executable of the benchmarks
4. An environment where it is possible to compile the library and benchmarks

To start with, I will assume that we have placed the source code and benchmarks code in our current directory. We will add the rest of the files

>>> ls
generic-lens-1.0.0.1/
benchmarks/

Step 1: Pinning nixpkgs

The most important step of the whole process is to “pin” our version of nixpkgs to a specific version so that anyone else trying to build the image will use the same versions of all the libraries and system dependencies.

Once we have established a commit of nixpkgs that our package builds with. We can use nix-prefetch-git in order to create nixpkgs.json which will provide the information about the pin.

nix-prefetch-git --rev 651239d5ee66d6fe8e5e8c7b7a0eb54d2f4d8621 --url https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git > nixpkgs.json

Now we have a file, nixpkgs.json which specifies which version of nixpkgs we should use.

We then need to load this file. Some boilerplate, nixpkgs.nix, will do that for us.

opts:
let
   hostPkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
   pinnedVersion = hostPkgs.lib.importJSON ./nixpkgs.json;
   pinnedPkgs = hostPkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
     owner = "NixOS";
     repo = "nixpkgs";
     inherit (pinnedVersion) rev sha256;
   };
in import pinnedPkgs opts

nixpkgs.nix will be imported in artefact.nix and will determine precisely the version of all dependencies we will use.

Step 2: Using dockerTools

Now we have specified the set of dependencies we want to use we can go about starting to build our docker image. Nixpkgs provides a convenient set of functions called dockerTools in order to create docker images in a declarative manner. This is the start of our artefact.nix file.

let
  pkgs = import ./nixpkgs.nix { };
in
with pkgs;
let
    debian = dockerTools.pullImage
      { imageName = "debian"
      ; imageTag = "9.5"
      ; sha256 = "1jxci0ph7l5fh0mm66g4apq1dpcm5r7gqfpnm9hqyj7rgnh44crb"; };
in
dockerTools.buildImage {
  name = "generic-lens-artefact";

  fromImage = debian;

  contents = [  bashInteractive
                glibcLocales
             ];

  config = {
    Env = ["LANG=en_US.UTF-8"
           "LOCALE_ARCHIVE=${glibcLocales}/lib/locale/locale-archive"];
    WorkingDir = "/programs";
  };
}

This is the barebones example we’ll start from. We firstly import nixpkgs.nix which defines the package set we want to use. Our docker file will be based on debian, and so we use the dockerTools.pullImage function to get this base image. The imageName comes from docker hub and the imageTag indicates the specific tag.

This image is our base image when calling dockerTools.buildImage. For now, we add the basic packages bashInteractive and glibcLocales, in the next step we will add the specific contents that we need for our artefact.

Setting the LANG and LOCALE_ARCHIVE env vars is important for Haskell programs as otherwise you can run into strange encoding errors.

This is a complete image which can already be build with nix-build artefact.nix. The result will be a .tar.gz which can be loaded into docker and run as normal.

Step 3: Including the artefact

First we’ll deal with making the executable itself available on the image. Remember that the source code of the benchmarks, which is a normal Haskell package, is located in benchmarks/.

We need to tell nix how to build the benchmarks. The standard way to do this is to use cabal2nix to generate a package specification which we will pass to haskellPackages.callPackage.

cabal2nix benchmarks/ > benchmarks.nix

This will produce a file which looks a bit like

{ mkDerivation, base, criterion, deepseq, dlist, dump-core
, generic-lens, geniplate-mirror, haskell-src, lens, mtl, one-liner
, parallel, plugin, random, stdenv, syb, transformers, uniplate
, weigh
}:
mkDerivation {
  pname = "benchmarks";
  version = "0.1.0.0";
  src = ./benchmarks;
  isLibrary = false;
  isExecutable = true;
  executableHaskellDepends = [
    base criterion deepseq dlist dump-core generic-lens
    geniplate-mirror haskell-src lens mtl one-liner parallel plugin
    random syb transformers uniplate weigh
  ];
  license = stdenv.lib.licenses.bsd3;
}

Now we will add the executable to the docker image. A new definition is created in the let bindings and then we add the executable to the contents of the image.

run-benchmarks = haskellPackages.callPackage ./benchmarks.nix {};

So now our contents section will look like:

  contents = [  bashInteractive
                glibcLocales
                run-benchmarks
                ];

When we build this image, the executable will be available on the path by default. In our case, the user will type bench and it will run the benchmarks.

Step 4: Including the source files

The next step is to add the source files to the image. To do this we use the runCommand script to make a simple derivation which copies some files into the right place.

benchmarks-raw = ./benchmarks;
benchmarks =
  runCommand "benchmarks" {} ''
  mkdir -p $out/programs/benchmarks
  cp -r ${benchmarks-raw}/* $out/programs/benchmarks
'';

All the derivation does is copy the directory into the nix store at a specific path. We then just add this to the contents list again and also do the same for the library itself and the README.

  contents = [  bashInteractive
                glibcLocales
                run-benchmarks
                benchmarks
                readme
                library];

Now once we build the docker image, we’ll have the executable bench available and also a file called README and two folders containing the library code and benchmarks code.

Step 5: An environment to build the source code

Finally, we need to do two more things to make it possible to build the source programs in the container.

Including cabal-install in the contents is the first so that we can use cabal in the container.

  contents = [  bashInteractive
                glibcLocales
                run-benchmarks
                benchmarks
                readme
                library
                cabal-install ];

The second is much less obvious, we need to make sure that the necessary dependencies are already installed in the environment so that someone can just use cabal build in order to build the package. The way to achieve this is to modify the benchmarks.nix file and change isLibrary to true.

-  isLibrary = false;
+  isLibrary = true;

This means that all the build inputs for the benchmarks are propagated to the container so all the dependencies for the benchmarks will be available to rebuild them again.

Complete artefact.nix

Here’s the complete artefact.nix that we ended up with. We also generated nixpkgs.json, nixpkgs.nix and benchmarks.nix along the way.

let
  pkgs = import ./nixpkgs.nix {};
in
with pkgs;
let
    debian = dockerTools.pullImage
      { imageName = "debian"
      ; imageTag = "9.5"
      ; sha256 = "1y4k42ljf6nqxfq7glq3ibfaqsq8va6w9nrhghgfj50w36bq1fg5"; };

    benchmarks-raw = ./benchmarks;
    benchmarks =
      runCommand "benchmarks" {} ''
        mkdir -p $out/programs/benchmarks
        cp -r ${benchmarks-raw}/* $out/programs/benchmarks
      '';

    library-raw = ./generic-lens-1.0.0.1;
    library =
      runCommand "benchmarks" {} ''
        mkdir -p $out/programs/library
        cp -r ${library-raw}/* $out/programs/library
      '';

    readme-raw = ./README;
    readme =
      runCommand "readme" {} ''
        mkdir -p $out/programs
        cp ${readme-raw} $out/programs/README
      '';

    run-benchmarks = haskellPackages.callPackage ./benchmarks.nix {};

in
dockerTools.buildImage {
  name = "generic-lens-artefact";


  fromImage = debian;

  contents = [  bashInteractive
                cabal-install
                glibcLocales
                run-benchmarks
                benchmarks
                readme
                library];

  config = {
    Env = ["LANG=en_US.UTF-8"
           "LOCALE_ARCHIVE=${glibcLocales}/lib/locale/locale-archive"];
    WorkingDir = "/programs";
  };
}

Conclusion

Hopefully this tutorial will be useful for anyone having to package a Haskell library in future. Each artefact is different so you’ll probably have to modify some of the steps in order to make it work perfectly for you. It’s also possible that the dockerTools interface will change but it should be possible to modify the examples here to adapt to any minor changes. If you’re already using nix, you probably know what you’re doing anyway.

Related Links

• Quick and Easy Nixpkgs Pinning - Vaibhav Sagar
• dockerTools documentation
• Reproducible Environments With Nix - Blair Archibald
• Reddit comments