Nix templates

NativeLink ships Nix flake templates that spin up a complete remote-execution environment in one command. Useful for experimenting with configuration changes, demoing the system, or debugging a regression on a known-good baseline.

Prerequisites

Nix with flakes enabled. The next-gen installer is the easiest path.
About 5 GB of disk space for the toolchain on first run.

Available templates

nix flake show github:TraceMachina/nativelink

The templates we ship and maintain:

Template	What it gives you
`bazel`	Bazel monorepo wired to a local NativeLink cluster.
`cargo`	Pure Cargo project with sccache pointing at NativeLink.
`lre`	Local Remote Execution — hermetic builds, no network.
`kubernetes`	`kind` cluster running the NativeLink Helm chart.

The Bazel template

The fastest path to a working RBE setup:

mkdir my-rbe-test && cd my-rbe-test
nix flake init -t github:TraceMachina/nativelink#bazel
nix develop

Inside the dev shell you have:

A pinned Bazel + Bazelisk.
A NativeLink server binary.
A .bazelrc.local already pointed at localhost:50051.

Start the NativeLink server in one terminal:

nativelink ./config/nativelink.json5

Build the included sample target in another:

bazel build //hello

Re-run; everything should hit the cache.

The LRE template

For Local Remote Execution:

mkdir my-lre-test && cd my-lre-test
nix flake init -t github:TraceMachina/nativelink#lre
nix develop

The dev shell provides a fully-hermetic Nix-pinned toolchain. NativeLink runs on localhost; Bazel is pre-configured to use it.

nativelink ./config/lre.json5
bazel build //hello

The first build of any target is the cost of compilation. Every subsequent build is the cost of one network round-trip to localhost.

The Kubernetes template

For prototyping a real deployment without leaving your laptop:

mkdir my-k8s-test && cd my-k8s-test
nix flake init -t github:TraceMachina/nativelink#kubernetes
nix develop

The flake includes kind, kubectl, helm, and the NativeLink chart. Bring up a local cluster:

kind create cluster
helm install nativelink ./chart
kubectl wait --for=condition=Ready pods --all

You now have CAS + scheduler + workers running in a local cluster on your laptop. Port-forward :50051 and point Bazel at it.

Customising

Every template is a flake — fork and edit. The most common modifications:

Swap the nativelink.json5 for a config matching your real environment.
Add custom worker platform properties.
Pin to a specific NativeLink release (inputs.nativelink.url).

What's next

Architecture — the data flow these templates exercise.
Configuration → Basic — the JSON5 the templates ship.