dvc.nix

Fetch DVC files and folders into the Nix store.

This repository provides expressions to parse and download DVC files and folders in Nix using fetchurl.

Installing dvc.nix

Currently dvc.nix is only exposed as a flake. To install it add dvc.nix as an input and provide the default overlay to nixpkgs.

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "...";
    dvc-nix.url = "github:xc-jp/dvc.nix";
  };
  outputs = inputs:
  let
    system = "...";
    pkgs = import inputs.nixpkgs {
      inherit system;
      overlays = [
        inputs.dvc-nix.overlays.default
      ];
    };
  in
  ...
}

Download a DVC output

If you know the MD5 hash for a DVC output you can download it from a remote given the URL and the hash. The output can be a file or a directory (with an md5 hash ending in ".dir").

pkgs.dvc-nix.fetch-dvc {
  md5 = "..."; # MD5 hash in hexadecimal (base16)
  baseurl = "https://dvc-remote.example.com";
}

Download all DVC outputs in a directory

To parse all .dvc files in a directory and then download all outputs for the parsed files run:

pkgs.dvc-nix.fetch-dvc-files {
  src = ./.;
  baseurl = "https://dvc-remote.example.com";
}

This will return an attribute set with the names being the relative paths in the src directory with characters not usable in Nix derivation names such as "/" replaced by "-", moreover "." is also replaced by "-" for convenience.

Download all DVC outputs in a directory as a list

To parse and download all .dvc files in a directory and then flatten the result, run:

pkgs.dvc-nix.map-dvc-files (dvc: ...) {
  src = ./.;
  baseurl = "https://dvc-remote.example.com";
}

The provided dvc derivation can be returned as-is to construct the list of derivations. The dvc derivation has three attributes out, dvc and path containing the DVC file configuration, the DVC output configuration, and the relative path in the src directory respectively.

For example you can use this to symlink all of the downloaded files into your derivation by adding the following hook to your derivation:

preBuild = pkgs.lib.concatStringsSep "\n" (pkgs.dvc-nix.map-dvc-files (dvc: ''ln -s ${dvc} ${dvc.path}'') {
  src = ./.;
  baseurl = "https://dvc-remote.example.com";
});

Motivation

The problem with calling dvc in a derivation is that it’s very difficult to set up SSH authentication. The other problem with using the dvc tool is that the hashes in DVC won’t agree with the hashes in Nix for folders.

To resolve those problems, we

1. Download the JSON description of a folder from DVC.
2. Fetch each individual file into the Nix store with curl and MD5 content hashes.
3. Reconstruct the folder using symlinks to the files we fetched into the Nix store.

And then we get all hashes coinciding between DVC and Nix.