edolstra/nix-serve

---

edolstra/nix-serve.json

{
  "createdAt": "2013-07-04T10:49:16Z",
  "defaultBranch": "master",
  "description": "A standalone Nix binary cache server",
  "fullName": "edolstra/nix-serve",
  "homepage": null,
  "language": "Perl",
  "name": "nix-serve",
  "pushedAt": "2025-11-24T23:02:13Z",
  "stargazersCount": 217,
  "topics": [],
  "updatedAt": "2025-11-23T15:23:29Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/edolstra/nix-serve"
}

nix-serve

nix-serve is a small utility to serve a Nix store as a binary cache, allowing it to be used as a substituter by other Nix installations.

Usage

The instructions below assume a flake-enabled version of Nix.

To start nix-serve, serving a binary cache on port 5000 of localhost:

# nix run github:edolstra/nix-serve

You can test whether the server works by running

# nix store ping --store http://localhost:5000

You can then pass --substituters http://localhost:5000/ to Nix to use this binary cache as a substituter.

nix-serve uses the Starman web server. See the starman documentation for additional flags you can pass, e.g.

# nix run github:edolstra/nix-serve -- --access-log /dev/stderr

Signing

It’s possible to sign the binary cache. First create a key pair:

# nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key cache.example.org-1 ./secret ./public
# cat public
cache.example.org-1:l24SFecAdWV31HIN8jqFAYpCMFyreZizab3HJ3KFEgQ=

Then run the server as follows:

# NIX_SECRET_KEY_FILE=./secret nix run ...

To check whether signing and signature verification works, do:

# nix verify --store http://localhost:5000 \
    --trusted-public-keys 'cache.example.org-1:l24SFecAdWV31HIN8jqFAYpCMFyreZizab3HJ3KFEgQ=' \
    /nix/store/...

where /nix/store/... is one or more store paths served by your binary cache.