In the previous article we walked through how to set up our very own Nix binary cache. It’s great being able to run attic push system /run/current-system on whichever machine we are currently using, but the the chances are that if you use Nix to manage your system configurations, you have a system configuration monorepo, and depending on how many machines and architectures you are targeting, it can quickly become tiresome to manually push to the cache from each of them.

I have tried running the Attic Nix Binary Cache on my Hetzner dedicated server in Germany a few times in the past, but the peering issues and the latency to Xfinity in Seattle have always made me throw my hands up in frustration. This morning I noticed a comment by Zhaofeng on the repo issue tracker. As a NixOS aficionado myself, I begrudgingly admit that I’ve been running my instance on fly.