This is a random assortment of notes of things I learned or I keep forgetting about nix.

No space left on /boot

Nix by default keeps all boot configurations in /boot, at some point this grows too much and you cannot nixos-rebuild switch.

You can either clean it up by manually running nix-collect-garbage --delete-older-than 30d or add this to your config:

nix.gc = {
  automatic = true;
  persistent = true; # Catch up on GC's while computer was asleep
  options = "--delete-older-than 30d";
}

Basic shell I use

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:
pkgs.mkShell {
  buildInputs = with pkgs; [
    # Runtime tools
  ];

  shellHook = ''
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="#{pkgs.lib.makeLibraryPath([ <runtime libs> ])}"
  '';
}

Use binaries precompiled for other systems

Something like this:

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:
let
  runtimeLibs = with pkgs; [ libGL stdenv.cc.cc fontconfig libxkbcommon zlib freetype libxml2 dbus xcb-util-cursor ] ++ (with xorg; [ libxcb libX11 libXcursor libXrandr libXi  ]);
in
pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "binaryninja-patch";
    src = ./.;
    phases = [ "installPhase" "fixupPhase" ];

    nativeBuildInputs = [ pkgs.makeWrapper ];

    installPhase = "mkdir -p $out/bin && cp -r $src/* $out/bin/";

    fixupPhase = ''
        chmod 755 $out/bin/*

        patchelf --set-interpreter "$(cat $NIX_CC/nix-support/dynamic-linker)" \
                         $out/bin/binaryninja
	# patchelf --set-rpath ${pkgs.xcb-util-cursor.out}/lib/libxcb-cursor.so.0 $out/bin/libQt6XcbQpa.so.6 

        wrapProgram $out/bin/binaryninja --set LD_LIBRARY_PATH \
                         "${pkgs.lib.makeLibraryPath runtimeLibs}"
    '';
}