One Nix flake to rule them all

Flakes are undoubtedly here to stay, and I’ve made my opinion on them well-known: they are “meh”.

Despite their ever-presence, adding a flake input continues to be a small annoyance that never goes away. It’s touted as a positive feature that flakes are federated but the reality is that I want the simplicity of a centralized flake. That was the beauty and power of nixpkgs.

The process is: you want disko, so you add a url , then a follows so it stops dragging in its own nixpkgs, and then you do it again for the next one. This has become a meme in the Nix community about how every flake drags in its own flake-utils.

I refuse to accept this user experience.

So I wondered: could one flake carry every other flake, and you just reach in for whatever you need? 🤯

omniflake is thousands of Nix flakes behind one flake input.

inputs . omniflake . url = "github:fzakaria/omniflake" ; inputs . omniflake . inputs . nixpkgs . follows = "nixpkgs" ;

Once you have omniflake, you can use it like any other input.

A package, in a shell or on a system:

environment . systemPackages = [ omniflake . flakes . nh . packages . ${ system } . default ];

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