Here's a simple question that most developers have asked themselves before: how do I get the feature/fix I just pushed to appear in the live application that runs on a server somewhere? If you already have a server and know how to operate it, this is mostly a question of convenience — you could always just run a handful of commands by yourself after every update — but it is a valid question.

I'm going to be completely honest with you: until about 3 years ago, I really had no clue what "fried rice" was. Which means that either the dish was never a notable entry on the menu of any of the "Asian" restaurants I grew up eating at, or there is not a consistent German name for it. Since then, however, some variations of fried rice have become regular appearances in my day-to-day meals.

Around 5 years ago, I set up my first virtual server as a place to run some of my Discord bots and other projects. I went into it knowing only very little about system administration and using Linux, but soon after, Linux became my operating system of choice for everyday activities. My interaction with the server was pretty infrequent after the initial setup – I pretty much only logged in whenever there was a new thing I wanted to add to the list of software running on it, or if I had to troubleshoot something. I ran almost all the software on it through Docker compose, and for applications that needed to accept incoming connections from the Internet, I copied and pasted some nginx config and ran certbot for TLS.

"What a year, huh?"

As I dive deeper into using Nix for my own software as opposed to "just" using NixOS to configure my systems, I recently found myself wanting to package a Clojure application with Nix for the first time. And since I'm one of the people who don't really see the benefit in leaving behind a working, easy-to-use tool like Leiningen for the archaic "write your own build scripts"-style of the official Clojure tooling, I needed to find a way to nixify Clojure applications that works for Leiningen-based projects.