This repository contains derivations for deploying ARTIQ via the Nix package manager.
To use, first set up Nix as described on its website. Make sure you have version 2.4 or higher (tested: 2.6–2.24). Both single-user and multi-user installs work fine for our purposes. If you choose the latter, you will probably want to add your user to the trusted users to be able to mark the binary caches as trusted (see below).
Then, to set up an environment suitable for running artiq_master
and related processes, clone this repository, e.g. into your
scratch folder:
$ cd ~/scratch
$ git clone https://github.com/OxfordIonTrapGroup/nix-oitg.git
Now, just run nix develop and follow the instructions on screen:
$ nix develop ~/scratch/nix-oitg
The Nix flake, together with its dependencies, provides a complete set of instructions on how to build all the components necessary to run ARTIQ from scratch (i.e., the respective source code). This, however, is quite a slow process, as it includes big projects such as LLVM, Rust, Python, etc. As building everything from source every time clearly isn't necessary, Nix allows one to configure "substituters", servers that can provide pre-built binary packages to be downloaded and extracted in place of re-running the build process locally on each machine.
This flake configure two extra substituters: First, our local build server (10.255.6.197) for custom packages and fast installs, and, as a fallback, the M-Labs build server. While we have some customisations to ARTIQ itself, the latter is still useful for things like Rust and LLVM, even though in normal use, those binaries should also be cached by our build server.
The former is accessed via SSH through a special, locked-down
nix-ssh user. Authentication should already be set up on the
group network, but note that Nix rejects connection to hosts the
SSH host keys of which are not known, rather than prompting you.
Thus, before running nix develop, make sure to connect to the
build server at least once:
$ ssh [email protected]
If everything works, you should get a
PTY allocation request failed on channel 0 error message, at which
point you can close the session (e.g. by pressing Ctrl-C).
If you are running Nix in multi-user mode, be sure to run this as the root user instead:
$ sudo ssh [email protected]
This flake pulls in several packages that are internal to the
Oxford Ion Trap Quantum Computing group, and hosted on our
private GitLab instance (gitlab.physics.ox.ac.uk). However, at this
stage, none of these contain any modifications necessary to make use
of our open-source projects (e.g. ndscan) in your laboratory. If you
do want to re-use this somewhat idiosyncratic method of deploying
ARTIQ as well, you will need to comment out the Oxford-specific
packages in flake.nix and change the URLs for artiq.git etc. to
refer to the public upstream repositories instead.
Please keep the Nix code formatted using nixfmt. You can easily
get it from Nix itself, e.g. using nix shell nixpkgs#nixfmt.