Are their any benefits of building using Nix instead of from source?

Namely, after you build your cardano node using Nix is their a better user experience for updating your node for hard forks using Nix vs compiling from source?

Cheers

The Nix build is a lot less painful than the bare metal build

i.e. one line like this (provided you have the iohk cache setup correctly) …

# Build + Install the cardano node
nix-build -A scripts.mainnet.node -o ~/bin/cardano-node

However, due to a nasty bug in haskell.nix this won’t work on ARM64.

I personally prefer to run my nodes as docker images and have the intriguing details of how to build, run, update the topology, setup monitoring, etc. already be done for me.

In my case this works great on beefy x86_64 machines as well as on the RaspberryPi. Here are the details on how this is done.

PS: Much of what you see there, may hopefully/eventually be available from official IOHK releases - I’m working on that :wink:

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