I am aware of the security issues and general flaws.
Anyways, what is the best way to package such a software?
I am generally new to packaging things and would love to learn it for once.
Specifically, I want to package
https://ollama.ai
For ollama, you can see from
https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama/blob/325cfcd9ffa8c5e19c7258471a864dcd8508d49a/docs/linux.md
that it can be installed by downloading a binary and putting that binary in the right directory. So something like the derivation below should work for a quick trial. (But it’s probably better to try and build it from source.)
{ fetchurl, lib, stdenv, autoPatchelfHook }:
stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
pname = "ollama";
version = "0.1"; #Change this!
src = fetchurl {
url = "https://ollama.ai/download/ollama-linux-amd64";
hash = "sha256-WxRimPMHV2qbePUu9EVniApXy2NrLK97LsXO+Burdkk=";
nativeBuildInputs = [
autoPatchelfHook
dontUnpack = true;
dontBuild = true;
dontConfigure = true;
installPhase = ''
mkdir -p $out/bin
install -m755 -D $src $out/bin/ollama
meta = with lib; {
homepage = "https://ollama.ai/";
description = "Enter Something Here";
platforms = platforms.linux;
You may have to add some libraries to buildInputs, though. For packaging binaries, you can also consult this: Packaging/Binaries - NixOS Wiki
It might still be useful to create an ollama-bin package, though! As you can see in this update request, it is sometimes difficult to build a project properly, which can delay updates. Having a binary package that doesn’t use nix to build the program but just ships the exact binary that the maintainer built can be useful as a workaround in such cases. Additionally, it can be helpful when debugging problems in the from-source package by comparing its behavior to the binary package.
So if you want to still have a go at this, feel free to do so!
Speaking of ollama, as I wanted to try this soon. I believe the binary package does not come with support for AMD ROCm built it. I think it would be nice, at least for me, to have an ollama-rocm version ready as well.
Edit: Could you @maixnor link your PR maybe?
