A Matrix bot that allows you to subscribe to build failures for nixpkgs-update (aka r-ryantm).

Message the bot at @nixpkgs-update-notify-bot:matrix.org (link) and type help to see a list of commands.

URL: https://nixpkgs-update-logs.nix-community.org (configurable via -url flag)

The main page is an HTML index of <a> links, one per attr path (e.g. python3Packages.diceware). Each link points to a per-package page, which in turn lists individual log files named by date (2024-12-10.log). Attr path names on this page are normalized by the nixpkgs-update bot (e.g. python3Packages rather than python312Packages).

The bot scrapes the main page on a timer and stores the normalized attr paths in the packages table — this is the canonical set of packages the bot knows about. It then fetches individual log files to check for build failures.

URL: https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable/packages.json.br

A brotli-compressed JSON file published with each nixos-unstable channel update. It contains metadata for every package in nixpkgs, keyed by attr path:

{
  "packages": {
    "python312Packages.diceware": {
      "meta": {
        "maintainers": [{ "github": "asymmetric" }, ...]
      }
    }
  }
}

This is used exclusively by the follow command to look up all packages maintained by a given GitHub handle. Unlike the log page, attr paths here are denormalized (e.g. python312Packages). The bot normalizes them before storing subscriptions so they match the log page's naming.

The bot has no access to the actual exit code of the nixpkgs-update runners, so it uses a simple heuristic to detect failures - it looks for "errory" words inside the build log. This is obviously fallible, and can lead to false positives and false negatives -- feel free to report them!

The normalization rules mirror filter.sed from nix-community/infra. Some rules normalize to a specific pinned version (e.g. beam26Packages, lua51Packages) — if upstream changes that canonical version, the rules here must be updated too, or follow subscriptions for those package sets will silently stop matching.

• Subscribe to multiple packages at once
• Subscribe to packages by team