Why We're Moving on from Nix

a year ago

Railway is releasing Railpack as the next iteration of their builder, moving away from Nixpacks.
Nixpacks had limitations, especially with versioning and image sizes, affecting 200k users.
Railpack offers granular versioning, smaller builds (38-77% reduction), and better caching.
Nix's commit-based package versioning was problematic, leading to maintainability and version lock issues.
Railpack is built in Go, uses BuildKit for image construction, and Mise for version resolution.
The Railpack process involves three parts: Analyze, Plan, and Generate, providing more control over builds.
Railpack supports Node, Python, Go, PHP, and static sites like Vite, Astro, CRA, and Angular.
Railpack is open source and available in Beta, with plans to expand language and framework support.

Hasty Briefsbeta