Pins¶
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¶
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.
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 mycache.cachix.org.
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 commmands, 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
To use the cachix pin command, ensure that you have upgraded to Cachix 1.5.
