Pins

Added in version 1.5.

Overview

Pins are a feature in Cachix that let you assign a persistent name to a store path.

Pinned paths are immune from garbage collection by default and their retention can be individually controlled.

Pins are useful for:

• Protecting important store paths, like releases and long-lived dependencies, from garbage collection.
• Exposing files from within a store path.
• Controlling the retention of certain store paths.

How to Create a Pin

1. Choose a name for your pin - This could be anything, but we recommend choosing something meaningful, like the tool’s name, version, git revision, or some combination of them all. For example, v1.7.
2. Pin a store path in a cache - Use the cachix pin command followed by the name of your cache, your chosen pin name, and the store path you want to pin.

$ cachix pin mycache v1.0 /nix/store/xxx-name-1.0

Current pins can be viewed and managed from your cache’s dashboard at https://app.cachix.org/cache/mycache/pins.

Controlling Retention with Pins

Pins maintain a history of revisions for each pin name. A new revision is created every time a store path is pinned with the same name. All revisions are kept indefinitely by default. You can choose to keep just the revisions added in the last X days with --keep-days, or just the last X revisions with --keep-revisions.

$ cachix pin mycache v1.0 /nix/store/xxx-name-1.0 --keep-days 3

Exposing Files with Artifacts

Pins allow you to expose and serve certain files from within a store path. Multiple artifacts can be added with the --artifact option when creating a new pin.

$ cachix pin mycache v1.0 /nix/store/xxx-name-1.0 --artifact etc/nginx.conf --artifact bin/name

Examples

In the following commands, we pin the go-1.7 and go-1.8 store paths:

$ cachix pin mycache go-1.7 /nix/store/nd3ssg3hiqj6ivvkv2n5q7ppdwh0wqcf-go-1.7
$ cachix pin mycache go-1.8 /nix/store/canq1nwdhxk4d2yj8pgywz7lqhkpyq2d-go-1.8