How to Install Microgit on nixOS Latest

This tutorial explains the installation process of Microgit on nixOS Latest. Microgit is an open source git client that provides a lightweight way to manage your git repositories.

Step 1: Install Nix package manager

First, make sure that Nix package manager is installed on your system. If you have not yet installed Nix, visit this page to download and install it on your system.

Step 2: Clone Microgit repository

Now that you have installed Nix, the next step is to clone the Microgit repository from GitHub. To do this, open your terminal and run the following command:

git clone https://github.com/microgit-com/microgit.git

This will clone the repository into your current working directory.

Step 3: Create a Nix build derivation

Nix provides a way to create build derivations for packages. We need to create a Nix build derivation for Microgit in order to install it on our system.

Open your text editor and create a new file called microgit.nix. Add the following code to this file:

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "microgit-${version}";
  src = ./microgit;
  version = "1.1.0";
  buildInputs = [ pkgs.cmake ];
  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out/bin
    cmake -S . -B build \
          -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$out \
          -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
    cmake --build build --parallel $(nproc)
    cmake --install build
  '';
}

This Nix derivation will build Microgit from the cloned source and install it into your system.

Step 4: Build and Install Microgit

To build and install Microgit, run the following command in your terminal:

nix-build microgit.nix -A package

This will generate a result symlink upon successful build. To make this symlink point to the output of our Microgit installation, we need to run the following command:

export PATH=$(pwd)/result/bin:$PATH

This will add the Microgit binary to your system's PATH. You can verify that the installation was successful by running the command microgit in your terminal. This should display the version of your newly installed Microgit.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to install Microgit on nixOS Latest using Nix package manager. We hope you found this helpful!