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2021-12-10-dhallDirectoryToNix.md

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title: dhallDirectoryToNix summary: Easily turn a directory of Dhall files into Nix tags: nixos draft: false

This post is part of a series called The Road to purescript2nix.

I recently sent a few PRs to Dhall and Nixpkgs that add functionality for easily reading in a directory of Dhall files into Nix. This even works for Dhall files that contain remote imports.

This blog post explains this new functionality, and gives pointers to the PRs that implemented this.

The final PR that actually adds dhallDirectoryToNix is NixOS/nixpkgs#144076, so make sure you are using a Nixpkgs checkout with that code before trying to use dhallDirectoryToNix.

Using dhallDirectoryToNix

The dhallDirectoryToNix function operates on a directory of Dhall files. It evaluates the files and reads in the output as Nix.

For instance, let's take a look at an example repository that contains Dhall files: https://github.com/cdepillabout/example-dhall-nix. Clone this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/cdepillabout/example-dhall-nix
$ cd example-dhall-nix/

Let's first use Dhall to evaluate the mydhallfile.dhall file:

$ dhall < ./mydhallfile.dhall
[ "BILLBILLbillbill"
, "JANEJANEjanejane"
, "TESTTESTtesttest"
, "TESTTESTtesttest"
, "TESTTESTtesttest"
]

If you look through the mydhallfile.dhall file, you'll see it contains both local imports and remote imports. All remote imports are protected with integrity checks. Evaluating this file produces a list of strings.

We can read this file into Nix using dhallDirectoryToNix. First, get into a Nix REPL with Nixpkgs available:

$ nix repl /some/path/to/a/local/nixpkgs/checkout/default.nix
nix-repl>

In the Nix REPL, call dhallDirectoryToNix on the above example-dhall-nix/ directory.

nix-repl> dhallDirectoryToNix { src = /some/path/to/example-dhall-nix; file = "mydhallfile.dhall"; }
[ "BILLBILLbillbill" "JANEJANEjanejane" "TESTTESTtesttest" "TESTTESTtesttest" "TESTTESTtesttest" ]

This shows how the output of the Dhall file is now available for us to use within Nix. This functionality can be really helpful when you have information in Dhall files that is needed in Nix to be able to make decisions about how to build packages.

Implementing dhallDirectoryToNix

Implementing dhallDirectoryToNix happened in a few stages:

  1. Add functionality to the dhall-to-nixpkgs tool so that it can use fixed-output derivations for building Dhall packages.
  2. The above change relies on a buildDhallUrl Nix function, so get that in Nixpkgs.
  3. Send the actual PR adding dhallDirectoryToNix to Nixpkgs.

The following sections talk about each of these changes.

dhall-to-nix and dhall-to-nixpkgs

Dhall contains two binaries related to using Dhall with Nix: dhall-to-nix (from the dhall-nix package on Hackage) and dhall-to-nixpkgs (from the dhall-nixpkgs package on Hackage).

dhall-to-nix

This binary allows you to read in an arbitrary Dhall expression and convert it to Nix. This is used in the dhallToNix function in Nixpkgs. Here's an example of using this function in the Nix REPL.

nix-repl> dhallToNix "List/length { mapKey : Text, mapValue : Natural } (toMap { foo = 0, bar = 3})"
2

There are two problems with dhallToNix:

  1. It doesn't handle imports. Trying to do a remote import in dhallToNix gives an error saying that remote imports are not allowed.
  2. dhallToNix accepts a Nix string as input. You can't have it easily accept a directory of Dhall files.

dhall-to-nixpkgs

This binary converts a directory of Dhall packages to a Nix expression for building them in Nixpkgs1. Here is an example of running dhall-to-nixpkgs on the above example package:

$ dhall-to-nixpkgs directory --name "foo" --file "mydhallfile.dhall" ./.
{ buildDhallDirectoryPackage, example-dhall-repo, Prelude }:
  buildDhallDirectoryPackage {
    name = "foo";
    src = ./.;
    file = "mydhallfile.dhall";
    source = false;
    document = false;
    dependencies = [
      (example-dhall-repo.overridePackage { file = "example1.dhall"; })
      (Prelude.overridePackage { file = "List/map.dhall"; })
      (Prelude.overridePackage { file = "Text/upperASCII.dhall"; })
      ];
    }

This produces an expression that can be built by passing it to dhallPackages.callPackage in Nixpkgs.

dhall-to-nixpkgs is somewhat similar to the tool cabal2nix. Just like Nix expressions produced by cabal2nix can be built by passing them to haskellPackages.callPackage, Nix expressions produced by dhall-to-nixpkgs can be built by passing them to dhallPackages.callPackage.

The problem with this usage of dhall-to-nixpkgs is that the above Nix expression takes all the remote imports in the input Dhall files as arguments.

For example, if you look at the mydhallfile.dhall, you can see that it has a remote import of the following Dhall file (note it also has an integrity check):

let
  mkUsersList =
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/example-dhall-repo/c1b0d0327/example1.dhall
    sha256:6534a24145e93db3df3ef4bc39e2ba743404ea3e8d6cfdbb868d5c83d61f10d2

...

This example-dhall-repo becomes an argument to the function output by dhall-to-nixpkgs. This means that we have to separately package example-dhall-repo by manually calling dhall-to-nixpkgs on it.

In theory, we shouldn't have to manually package remote imports, like example-dhall-repo. In the mydhallfile.dhall file, you can see that there is an integrity check on the import https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/example-dhall-repo/c1b0d0327/example1.dhall. We should be able to reuse this integrity check to download this remote import as a fixed-output derivation within Nix2.

The following section explains what was added to dhall-to-nixpkgs to force it to turn remote Dhall imports into Nix fixed-output derivations.

Adding a flag --fixed-output-derivations to dhall-nixpkgs

After a bit of a false start in Dhall PR #2304 and bunch of help from Gabriella Gonzalez, I put together Dhall PR #2318 and #2326 which add a new flag --fixed-output-derivation to the dhall-to-nixpkgs directory command.

Here is an example of using this flag:

$ dhall-to-nixpkgs directory --fixed-output-derivations --name "foo" --file "mydhallfile.dhall" ./.
{ buildDhallDirectoryPackage, buildDhallUrl }:
  buildDhallDirectoryPackage {
    name = "foo";
    src = ./.;
    file = "mydhallfile.dhall";
    source = false;
    document = false;
    dependencies = [
      (buildDhallUrl {
        url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/example-dhall-repo/c1b0d0327146648dcf8de997b2aa32758f2ed735/example1.dhall";
        hash = "sha256-ZTSiQUXpPbPfPvS8OeK6dDQE6j6NbP27ho1cg9YfENI=";
        dhallHash = "sha256:6534a24145e93db3df3ef4bc39e2ba743404ea3e8d6cfdbb868d5c83d61f10d2";
        })
      (buildDhallUrl {
        url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/9758483fcf20baf270dda5eceb10535d0c0aa5a8/Prelude/List/map.dhall";
        hash = "sha256-3YRf+0Vo1AMn8qgX60LRxhOLkpynWNULwzES7zyIVoA=";
        dhallHash = "sha256:dd845ffb4568d40327f2a817eb42d1c6138b929ca758d50bc33112ef3c885680";
        })
      (buildDhallUrl {
        url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/9758483fcf20baf270dda5eceb10535d0c0aa5a8/Prelude/Text/upperASCII.dhall";
        hash = "sha256-Ra5PvYFLBHTmXCik7pKyO5eYkvpbtzcwvJlnWueQyik=";
        dhallHash = "sha256:45ae4fbd814b0474e65c28a4ee92b23b979892fa5bb73730bc99675ae790ca29";
        })
      ];
    }

You can see that when passing this --fixed-output-derivations flag, the function produced no longer takes any arguments. Instead, all dependencies are packaged as fixed-output derivations using a Nix function buildDhallUrl.

The hash argument passed to buildDhallUrl is the Nix-compatible hash of the Dhall file specified in the url argument. This is the same as the integrity check in the Dhall file, just base64-encoded instead of base16-encoded.

This --fixed-output-derivations flag is available in dhall-to-nixpkgs as of version 1.0.7.

In order to use this new --fixed-output-derivations flag, the buildDhallUrl function will need to be present in Nixpkgs. The next section talks about getting that function in Nixpkgs.

Adding buildDhallUrl to Nixpkgs

The buildDhallUrl function was added to Nixpkgs in Nixpkgs PR #142825.

A high-level explanation of buildDhallUrl is that it uses dhall to fetch the remote import, and then encodes the output in a standard, Dhall-defined format. This is done in a fixed-output derivation so that dhall can access the network. This is able to be a fixed-output derivation because of the Dhall integrity check on the URL.

The output of buildDhallUrl is a standard Nixpkgs Dhall package, similar to what is output by dhallPackages.callPackage. See the Dhall section in the Nixpkgs manual for more info.

buildDhallUrl is available in Nixpkgs 21.11, and Nixpkgs master as of 2021-11-09.

Now that dhall-to-nixpkgs has the --fixed-output-derivations flag, and buildDhallUrl is in Nixpkgs, we can write dhallDirectoryToNix. The next section explains this.

Adding dhallDirectoryToNix to Nixpkgs

Nixpkgs PR 144076 adds the dhallDirectoryToNix function to Nixpkgs.

dhallDirectoryToNix uses import-from-derivation (IFD) to easily read in a directory of Dhall files into Nix. Here's the example call to dhallDirectoryToNix again:

nix-repl> dhallDirectoryToNix { src = /some/path/to/example-dhall-nix; file = "mydhallfile.dhall"; }
[ "BILLBILLbillbill" "JANEJANEjanejane" "TESTTESTtesttest" "TESTTESTtesttest" "TESTTESTtesttest" ]

dhallDirectoryToNix roughly does the following steps:

  1. Call dhall-to-nixpkgs on the src passed to dhallDirectoryToNix. This produces a Nix file corresponding to a Nixpkgs Dhall package.
  2. Use IFD to import and build the Nixpkgs Dhall package produced in the previous step. This uses buildDhallUrl under the hood.
  3. Call dhallToNix on the resulting Nixpkgs Dhall package in the previous step. This evaluates the Dhall package built in the previous step and converts it to Nix code.

Check out the above PR if you're interested in exactly how this works.

dhallDirectoryToNix is available in Nixpkgs master as of 2021-12-08. It will likely be available in Nixpkgs 22.05.

Caveats

There are two problems with dhallDirectoryToNix you might run into:

  1. dhall-to-nix can't convert all Dhall expressions into Nix, so you're not able to convert any arbitrary Dhall expression to Nix. But dhall-to-nix does seem good at converting JSON-like Dhall expressions to Nix. I imagine most Dhall files that people want to read into Nix are basic JSON-like expressions.
  2. dhallDirectoryToNix doesn't seem to work well when using it from a flake. You can find out more in this related issue.

Conclusion

Implementing dhallDirectoryToNix ended up being harder than I was expecting, but came out quite nice. dhallDirectoryToNix is an easy way to read an arbitrary directory of Dhall files in as a Nix expression. It even supports remote imports in your Dhall files (as long as they have integrity checks).

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. dhall-to-nixpkgs has other functionality as well, but it is not relevant to the above explanation. See the Dhall section in the Nixpkgs manual for more info. ↩

  2. I took a quick look, but I couldn't find a succinct explanation of a fixed-output derivation anywhere on the net. Basically, it is a derivation where you know in advance the hash of what will be output after building the derivation. These derivations are treated specially by Nix. You're able to access the network while building these derivations. Fixed-output derivations are normally used for downloading files from the internet. ↩