I've tried to learn nix and tried to read various documentation. The problem was that there was always a piece of information missing. That was until I've found the nix pills which are a pretty good and structured introduction on people interested in building packages with nix.
I'm still in the learning process, but one thing I've had a hard time is finding out what functions are available. e.g. there's stdenv.mkDerivation for a generic target, and as your docs mention pythonXY.withPackages for a python virtualenv [1]. But what if I wanted, e.g. Ruby? How do I find out what's available? What options they take?
This is less packaging related (more nix lang related) but here is my go to resource for functions: https://teu5us.github.io/nix-lib.html. teu5us extracted the builtin/lib function docs and put them on one place saving you from having it split up into multiple manuals.
One issue with nix is the content has been written down it’s very inaccessible. It is split up between blog posts, discourse, nixpkgs code comments, the wiki, Reddit, etc. When working on something in nix I’ll frequently have 10+ sources of information. The google-fu needed is strong.
My biggest recommendation is to dive into the nixpkgs repo and other public dotfiles as most likely what you are doing has been done.
Would love to see some documentation on dealing with SSL decryption for those who are in MITM corporate environments.
I've struggled with this as I recently got a new Mac for work and I tried to set it up from scratch with Nix but I couldn't even get it to connect to the nixpkgs channel. I tried every solution I could find online for pulling the CAs and specifying the NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE, but it borked even after I left the office and connected through another network (and wiping and reinstalling Nix didn't seem to fix it, but I probably didn't do that correctly either...).
Eventually I gave up and went back to homebrew and setup scripts.
You need to make sure the `https_proxy` environment variable is set correctly as well. There used to be some coverage of this in the manual, but it looks like maybe it's gone now.
Nice guide! One thing I noticed missing is how to use nix flakes (e.g. in place of niv). That is my next thing to understand, and I want to convert my NixOS / shell.nix files to use them.
