status-mobile/nix

Description

This folder contains configuration for Nix, a purely functional package manager used by the Status app for its build process.

Configuration

The main config file is nix/nix.conf and its main purpose is defining the binary caches which allow download of packages to avoid having to compile them yourself locally.

NOTE: If you are in Asia you might want to add the https://nix-cache-cn.status.im/ to be first in order of substituters. Removing cache.nixos.org could also help.

Build arguments

We leverage the config argument of standard nixpkgs for our own parameterization of the builds (e.g. to pass a build number or build type).

Here is a sample structure of the config attribute set:

{
  status-im = {
    build-type = "pr";     # Build type (influences which .env file gets used for feature flags)
    build-number = 9999;   # Used for versionCode and CFBundleVersion in Android and iOS respectively
    android = {
      gradle-opts = "";    # Gradle options passed for Android builds
      keystore-path = "";  # Path to keystore for signing the APK
      abi-split = false;   # If APKs should be split based on architectures
      abi-include = "x86"; # Android architectures to build for
    };
    status-go = {
      src-override = "$HOME/my/source/status-go"; # local source override
    };
  };
}

You can see the defaults in nix/config.nix.

Shell

In order to access an interactive Nix shell a user should run make shell.

The Nix shell is started in this repo via the nix/scripts/shell.sh script, which is a wrapper around the nix-shell command and is intended for use with our main Makefile. This allows for an implicit use of nix-shell as the default shell in the Makefile.

Normally the shell starts without any specific target platform, if you want to change that you should export the TARGET env variable with appropriate value:

make shell TARGET=android

This way your shell and all other nix commands should run in a setup that is tailored towards Android development.

For valid values you can check the nix/shells.nix file.

Using a local status-go repository

If you need to use a locally checked-out status-go repository, you can achieve that by defining the STATUS_GO_SRC_OVERRIDE environment variable:

export STATUS_GO_SRC_OVERRIDE=$GOPATH/src/github.com/status-im/status-go
make release-android

Resources

You can learn more about Nix by watching these presentations:

• Nix Fundamentals (PDF, src)
• Nix in Status (PDF, src)

And you can read nix/DETAILS.md for more information.

Known Issues

See KNOWN_ISSUES.md.