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Cache Population

Populating the cache involves uploading .nar files and .narinfo metadata to your OCI registry.

Automated Push via run​

The simplest way to populate the cache is by using the run execution wrapper. It automatically detects new store paths generated by the inner command and pushes them.

Important: Currently, if you want Aeroflare to successfully push the resulting artifacts, you must pass the --print-out-paths flag to your Nix build command so Aeroflare knows what to upload.

nix run github:ItzEmoji/aeroflare -- run -- nix build .#default --print-out-paths

Explicit Push via CLI​

If you want to manually push existing Nix store paths to the cache, you can use the aeroflare push command.

Pushing a Specific Path​

nix run github:ItzEmoji/aeroflare -- push --store-path /nix/store/13x...-my-package

Pushing Multiple Paths​

You can provide a file containing a list of store paths (one per line).

nix path-info --all > paths.txt
nix run github:ItzEmoji/aeroflare -- push --input paths.txt --workers 100

Note: You can increase the --workers flag to speed up the upload process. The default is 50.

Pushing Signatures​

If you are maintaining a public cache, you must sign the .narinfo files so that downstream Nix clients trust them.

  1. Generate a Nix signing key pair: 
    nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key my-cache-name cache-priv-key.pem cache-pub-key.pem
  2. Pass the private key to the push command: 
    nix run github:ItzEmoji/aeroflare -- push --store-path /nix/store/... --signing-key ./cache-priv-key.pem

Clients consuming this cache will need to add the contents of cache-pub-key.pem to their trusted-public-keys in nix.conf.