Everything about nix

We've achieved our goals already with this series: we have a web service written in Rust, built into a Docker image with nix, with a nice dev shell, that we can deploy to fly.io.

There it is. The final installment.

Over the course of this series, we've built a very useful Rust web service that shows us colored ASCII art cats, and we've packaged it with docker, and deployed it to https://fly.io.

In the previous chapter, we've made a nix "dev shell" that contained the fly.io command-line utility, "flyctl".

That said, that's not how I want us to define a dev shell.

Remember the snapshot we made allll the way back in Part 1? Now's the time to use it.

Well, make sure you've committed and pushed all your changes, but when you're ready, let's go back in time to before we installed anything catscii-specific in our VM.

Now that my website is deployed as a container image, I wanted to give nix a try. I'm still doing it the old-fashioned way right now: with a Dockerfile, running cargo in a "builder" image, copying stuff out of there into a slimmer image (that still has an Ubuntu base, even though distroless images are a thing now).

But why?