Nostrpkgs

A collection of Nostr tools to be used with the Nix package manager.

Goals

Be the easiest, fastest, and free-est way to use Nostr tools.

Big goals

• Modules for relays: provide canonical module implementations so that users can just pull in a relay to their NixOS config, declare its settings, and throw it in the cloud.
• Play nice with nix-bitcoin: should just work by adding to, or combining with, a nix-bitcoin config. Think how alby-hub can use a LN node, or NWC.
• https://nostrpkgs.cachix.org . A Cache for binaries: provide a cache for users to leverage prebuilt binaries of theses tools, a la cache.nixos.org.
• An auto-update bot, like nixpkgs-update.
• A terminal UI for searching packages or configuring modules (module configs are forms, basically).

Usage

You can think of this repository as a collection which contains build recipes for packages. It aims to provide these recipes for all major architectures, irrespective of a project's programming language or build system.

For example, if you want to build nak on your local machine, you could do:

nix build github:jurraca/nostrpkgs#nak

Nix can resolve the GitHub URL, find this repo, and find the nak package within the flake.nix by addressing it with a #. This will create a build in your current directory under result/bin/nak.

You could also just run it without creating a userspace reference to the build with nix run:

nix run github:jurraca/nostrpkgs#nak --help

You can pass arguments to it like you usually would, in this case print the help text.

Binary cache

A binary cache is available serving these packages at https://nostrpkgs.cachix.org. See CACHE.md.

Using modules

The modules dir contains module definitions you can pull in to your Nix config.

The flake also exposes an options output which will print the available options for a module. Run: nix eval --json .#options.{module_name} for a given module_name. Very handy for agents to implement a module.

Contributing

Please contribute packages via PRs or request packages you would like to see included via Issues.

When contributing, please follow Nixpkgs commit conventions.

Some pointers/warnings:

• This is for tools, not libraries.
• It's intended primarily for CLI and desktop, not mobile, but that may change!
• Aim to package projects that are actively maintained.
• Some languages are far easier to package than others: Go, Rust, Elixir.
• Think about the future generations and avoid JavaScript if you can help it.
• Python remains the gnarliest language to package with Nix.