blog/source/_posts/custom-package-nixos-module.md

title	excerpt	date	tags
Using custom package in a NixOS module	A workaround for installing GitHub-hosted package in a IPv6-only host	2021-07-02	nixos

I recently setup {% post_link cloudflare-argo-nixos 'cloudflared' %} on instances that power this website, while I got it working on most of them, it's not working on IPv6-only instance. There was installation guide which I managed to resolve later (and what this post is about) and Cloudflare tunnel itself doesn't support IPv6 yet.

A quick recap on two of the main components of NixOS: module and package. A package is a program that is available on NixOS repository, the repo doesn't contain the binary, it's made up of nix files that describe how to compile it. In this case, cloudflared.nix is a script to download the source code from GitHub and compile it as a Go program.

A module is (usually) used to install a program as a service and make it configurable via configuration.nix. For example, i2pd.nix module installs i2pd package (pkgs.i2pd) when services.i2pd.enable is enabled.

A major issue is that GitHub doesn't support IPv6 yet, so my IPv6-only instance couldn't download the source code. A common workaround is to mirror the repo somewhere else that does support IPv6, which is what I did. Then, I created a new custom package nix:

{% codeblock cloudflared-custom.nix lang:nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/networking/cloudflared/default.nix source mark:8 %} { lib, buildGoModule, fetchgit }:

buildGoModule rec { pname = "cloudflared"; version = "2021.6.0";

src = fetchgit { url = "https://example.com/example/cloudflared-mirror.git"; rev = "refs/tags/${version}"; sha256 = "sha256-cX0kdBPDgwjHphxGWrnXohHPp1nzs4SnvCry4AxMtp0="; };

vendorSha256 = null;

doCheck = false;

buildFlagsArray = "-ldflags=-X main.Version=${version}";

meta = with lib; { description = "CloudFlare Argo Tunnel daemon (and DNS-over-HTTPS client)"; homepage = "https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-tunnel"; license = licenses.unfree; platforms = platforms.unix; maintainers = [ maintainers.thoughtpolice maintainers.enorris ]; }; } {% endcodeblock %}

In my {% post_link cloudflare-argo-nixos 'cloudflared module' %}, I updated the following lines:

  options.services.argoWeb = {
    enable = mkEnableOption "Cloudflare Argo Tunnel";

    config = mkOption {
      default = "/etc/caddy/argoWeb.yml";
      type = types.str;
      description = "Path to cloudflared config";
    };

    dataDir = mkOption {
      default = "/var/lib/argoWeb";
      type = types.path;
      description = ''
        The data directory, for storing credentials.
      '';
    };

+    package = mkOption {
+      default = pkgs.cloudflared;
+      defaultText = "pkgs.cloudflared";
+      type = types.package;
+      description = "cloudflared package to use.";
+    };
  };

-        ExecStart = "${pkgs.cloudflared}/bin/cloudflared --config ${cfg.config} --no-autoupdate tunnel run";
+        ExecStart = "${cfg.package}/bin/cloudflared --config ${cfg.config} --no-autoupdate tunnel run";

Finally, in my configuration.nix, I configured it to use the custom package:

  require = [
    /etc/caddy/argoWeb.nix
  ];

  nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
  services.argoWeb = {
    enable = true;
+    package = pkgs.callPackage (import /etc/caddy/cloudflared-custom.nix) { };
    config = "/etc/caddy/argoWeb.yml";
  };