The main problem here is the huge amount of stuff that'd need to be checked into the repository. Now, that's a failing of the tooling as far as I can tell, but even if it can't be helped it's still way too much, IMO.

It would create less, if it was added to ./pkgs/development/node-packages/node-packages.json instead.

OK, let me try to add it via node-packages.json. I thought it is ok because I saw pump.io is doing something similar.

By the way, I think adding the module alone is not enough to make it usable. The ghost package only comes with the core part, it does not include any theme and the admin panel. To make it work, I have to run grunt init at the package level, what is the best practice of doing that? A new nix derivation that points to the generated node module, with a buildPhase?

Updated to use node-packages.json

This project seems to use bower to download assets. We have this tool for that: https://github.com/rvl/bower2nix

Hello, sorry for the late follow up, have been busy for a while... After some trial and error, I think using node-packages.json might not be very suitable and decided to revert to the original approach. The reasons are:

• The existing build system of ghost is impure, for example it depends on codes from other repositories has to be pulled as a submodule without tagging. To workaround this, patch of the build script is needed, which makes it more difficult to maintain.
• node2nix (which node-packages.json is depending on) is not enough to setup dependencies, the npm package "knex" looks for optional dependencies such as mysql and pq in runtime, and users are expected to install them manually. That does not work in the nix workflow because the dependency graph is generated.
• A pre-build zip file already exists, why not just use it, for its simplicity?
• I agree that this PR is big and hard to read every line, but using node-packages.json or bower2nix would also create a big diff, they won't make things better. If it helps, I can write a readme on how is the file generated.

I still think 11K lines for a single package is way too much.

The repo is a commons, so there has to be a reasonable payoff for each line added. This proposal falls short of that by far. Consider that 20 package expressions of this size would add more lines than is required to describe the entire open source Haskell ecosystem (thousands of packages).

Right, this is big, but is there any way to make it smaller? If I use node-packages.json, I would need extra packages (devDependencies) to build it, which probably makes the diff even bigger.

If you cannot add it into Nixpkgs yet, maybe you can provide an overlay for it, such that others can follow this overlays updates, and potentially contribute back.

I agree with @nbp. Please provide this in an overlay. I'm closing this out because of the concerns raised earlier.

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-installing-services-from-npm-possibly-w-overlays/5479/1