Nix is a tool that creates immutable derivations of configurations written in a functional language. This means we don’t depend on our system’s environment at run or build time to create a package, instead we declare all of the dependencies and build in an isolated environment to avoid pollution (a pure environment in nix terms). Because we have declared all of our dependencies, it also means that we can re-build the same exact package again and again (and again!) without worrying about whether we remembered to install libssl-dev before starting to compile or if the new version of a library will break our software because the maintainer make a breaking change in a patch dependency. Plus we can try software out and quickly discard it without worrying about all the extra packages it required.

Background

I used PlexAmp for a few years. Plex’s constant upselling me on services when I already have a lifetime membership really soured me on their service. I don’t have a hole poked in my network for external Plex streaming, but having the option always made me nervous for those that do. Excellent UI but privacy/ownership compromises and constant barrage of “buy this video” or “stream our “free” tv station” really rubbed me wrong. Why am I hosting my own media to still be barraged with ads/requests to buy things?

Background

It’s not a dev blog if you don’t change everything about it every time you remember to publish a blog, and this post is no different. My blog has long been on Jekyll, but I also lose it (literally sometimes I can’t find the source) and forget about it.

Recently I’ve set up a MinIO cluster on my personal infrastructure for hosting some internal state and content (Forgejo assets, Matrix Synapse images, Outline assets, etc) and I’ve been looking for other ways to utilize this service I’m hosting. For the past couple of years my blog has been hosted in Azure in an Azure Blob fronted by Azure Front Door (for https). This is ok, but it’s a real pain to remember how to set it up and the terraform never fully encompassed all the options as some of them weren’t exposed to the API (at least when I first terraformed it).