TIL: Build a Go app from local src directory on NixOS

To run a simple build of a Go project on NixOS, you can write a small default.nix file into the root directory of your project. Here is my default.nix for Stomper.

with import <nixpkgs> {};

buildGoModule {
        pname = "stomper";
        version = "0.0.1";

        src = ./.;

        vendorSha256 = null;
}

This file uses the buildGoModule Nix function to execute the build. Since vendorSha256 is set to null, we must run go mod vendor in the project’s root directory before running our build. Once we’ve done this, we can run nix build and see our binary in the result/bin directory.

If you are working on a NixOS install that does not currently have an active Go installation, you can activate one by running nix-shell -p go.

Tags: til nixos linux