How is nilla usable without its cli?

[crop2000]

I ask this question because i think it could be very beneficial to document this aspect.
And because I hope that it is possible to avoid monolithic solutions.

[jakehamilton]

Nilla is plain Nix. You can indeed work with it using the nix CLI directly and this is actually what I end up doing a lot during development to check things! To do so, you want to target the nilla.nix file and pick out the attribute you want.

# For example, to build a package
nix build -f ./nilla.nix config.packages.mypackage.build.x86_64-linux

The Nilla CLI exists to unify some of the other CLIs you might want to use (like nixos-rebuild) as well as cutting out a bit of the boilerplate needed (such as config.packages. or system specifiers). I'd recommend working with it, but you don't have to.

[ProjectInitiative]

Does this mean there is OOTB compatibility with tools like deploy-rs, disko and nixos-anywhere? I know typically those work with flake outputs. Based on the attribute you mentioned, I would assume it would be similar

[jakehamilton]

For tools that require a flake.nix (like deploy-rs) you will have to wire up your project outputs to a flake if you still wish to use that tool. Though, there are many tools which let you use any nix file and select a specific attribute. These tools can operate directly on your Nilla project outputs of the box.

[jakehamilton]

Note that this has now changed to be a little simpler in recent versions of Nilla. You can remove the config mention from the command. The build attribute should also be renamed to result.

nix build -f ./nilla.nix packages.mypackage.result.x86_64-linux