Script Dependencies with Nix

In the theme of NixOS enabling fearlessness, here’s a way I use Nix on other Linux distributions to sleep better at night: managing dependencies of simple scripts.

This way of using Nix is for everyone, not just those willing to try NixOS. We’ll look at it first for a Python script, and then see how it can be adapted to any other language.

I wanted to create a script that would read the verbatim content of my articles out loud to me with a synthesised voice. One of the more convenient ways to do this is with Python, where I’ve heard good things about Trafilatura for extracting the contents out of a web page, filtering on types of content, etc.

But Trafilatura is a third-party Python dependency. Those suck because they break your scripts when you so much as glance sideways at pip. The code also ended up depending on aplay, which is a system dependency, making it two different sources of future breakage. A couple of years ago, I would probably have judged that to be too much maintenance, so I wouldn’t have created the script. Fortunately, now I know about Nix.