Proof of concept for a plug-and-play Discord bot using Nix flakes / devenv for fully reproducible development and production environments.
Automation infrastructure is commonly tied to "mutable" server infrastructure, which is difficult to reproduce from instance to instance. The industry standard solution to this problem has been to use Docker containers, which codifies replicable environments in Dockerfiles. However, Docker, Podman, and all other OCI-compatible runtimes have two major flaws:
- High overhead due to virtualization
- OCI container runtimes are significantly lighter than full operating system virtualization tools such as Oracle VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation, but still come at a significant performance cost.
- Inconsistent reproduction of binaries and environments
- Dockerfiles and Docker containers are replicable, meaning that they follow a specific set of instructions to achieve a similar production of an environment. However, any environment that is created from a Dockerfile does not have a 1:1 correspondance to any other given environment: in other words, it is impossible to guarantee an exact binary reproduction of a given piece of software built from within a Docker container.
- Any steps inside of a Dockerfile which fetch software updates lead to decreases in the reproducibility of binaries. This may lead to inconsistency between deployments, potentially leading to unpredictable deployment outcomes.
A more optimal solution, then, would need to accomplish the following:
- Eliminate the need for virtualization without compromising deployment stability
- Build exact 1:1 reproductions of a binary or of a development / production environment
The Nix programming language and package manager accomplishes both of these goals, allowing for faster and safer development and deployment.
Nix is a DSL that follows the functional programming language paradigm. It allows for easy reproductions of environments and applications through exact dependency version matching.
NixOS is a GNU/Linux operating system distribution with the Nix binaries pre-installed.
Please see installing nix for details.
This example project uses dotenv as a way to store and access sensitive information such as Discord bot tokens.
To run your own Discord bot, you'll need the following information:
- Your bot's
token - Your bot's
application ID - The
guild ID(Discord server ID) you want to register the bot's commands for
After cloning the repo, create a .env file and add the following fields:
BOT_TOKEN=(your bot token)
CLIENT_ID=(your bot's application id)
GUILD_ID=(your discord server's ID)
Once you have created the .env file and entered your bot and server details, you're ready to run the bot.
To run the bot, run the following command:
nix develop --impure --command devenv up
This does the following:
- Installs all the required dependencies for the bot
- Enters a development shell with those dependencies active
- Registers all the implemented slash commands for the server ID provided
- Starts the bot as a process
This is all accomplished by using devenv.
devenv enables developers to enter isolated development shells which contain the exact versions of dependencies other developers on their team are using. Additionally, devenv's Nix bindings are more clear and succinct than Nix's regular syntax for managing development shells.
To enter a development shell with all the necessary dependencies for the project pre-installed, simply run the following:
nix develop --impure
To register commands while in a devenv shell, simply run the following pnpm command:
pnpm run register
To run the bot while in a devenv shell, simply run the project as you normally would with any other discord.js bot:
node .
Alternatively, you could run the bot as a service.
To run the bot as a foreground service while in a development shell, simply run:
devenv up
To kill the process, press F10.
You can also run the service in the background. To do this, run:
devenv up -d
To kill the background process, run:
devenv processes stop