Hasura CLI on NixOS: A Working Solution

This post comes after an exciting discovery of a solution to a problem I and my team have been facing for a while: Getting Hasura CLI work on NixOS like any other program.

Problem

NixOS has its own way of managing packages and dependencies. Unlike a typical Linux distribution, programs are installed in isolated environments called Nix profiles. This is great for reproducibility and isolation, but it can be a bit challenging when you want to use a program that is not available in the Nix package set.

Hasura CLI proved to be one of these tricky programs due to its extensions architecture or implementation.

Simply, <nixpkgs> has a very outdated package. Building a recent Hasura CLI from source is fine, but users get runtime errors due to that the plugin system does not work on NixOS.

I could not get to the source of the problem, but I found a workaround after trying many options, including community members’ hacks.

Interim Solution

Two solutions worked for us although the first one was simply not practical to use:

1. Use Hasura CLI from within a Docker container: This caused more problems then it solved.
2. Use buildFHSUserEnv: This solution worked for me and my team for quite some time, but it has its own issues such as a half-broken Nix shell where many commands do not work.

A Working Solution

I discovered a solution by @adamgoose as a comment on a related GitHub issue. It made sense and I gave it a try.

It was simple and it worked! I then decided to share it as a Nix function on GitHub:

https://github.com/vst/hasura-cli-nix

You can try it in a Nix shell:

{ ... }:

let
  pkgs = import <nixpkgs> { };
  hasura-cli-nix = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "vst";
    repo = "hasura-cli-nix";
    rev = "98e796e57a37ffe98233cb174e439e3e7657166d";
    sha256 = "sha256-SiOSip48jk1CbtcMmN79+ca6A3slS9XGffhZFTLoWYU=";
  };
  hasura-cli = (pkgs.callPackage hasura-cli-nix { }).cli;
in
pkgs.mkShell {
  buildInputs = [
    hasura-cli
  ];
}

… and:

$ nix-shell --run "hasura metadata diff"

Wrap-Up

Hasura is a great tool. I was worried about a few things such as huge RAM consumption, excessive focus on new features and functions despite many outstanding issues, long time rewrite of the server in Rust, etc…

None of them were deal-breakers for me. But our Hasura CLI experience was quite concerning and frustrating.

There is not a single program on my NixOS system that does not work as expected except Hasura CLI. This exception is now resolved.