Guix London, 8th meetup

Intro

The next Guix London meetup is scheduled for Monday 15th January, 6 pm London time (i.e. UTC) onward. 😃🤖🌈💻 Join us in person or online, address and link below.

- In person, from 6:00 pm: 20 Farringdon St, EC4A 4AB
- Online, from 6:10 pm: https://meet.jit.si/london-guix-meetup

If you attend in person, please make sure you RSVP and share your full name (or a nickname) so that we can register you at the building's reception.

The main part of the meetup will be an introduction to the guix-forge project, led by Arun Isaac. If you have any Guix or Guile related question or topic, there should be the time to talk about that too. All welcome!

Self-hosting and autonomy using guix-forge

As free software programmers, whether we like it or not, we often host our projects on large centralized and proprietary software forges such as GitHub. In theory, it is perfectly possible to host our own forges using free software such as GitLab, Gitea, etc. But, life is short, and setup and maintenance of these services is more work than it seems at first.

GNU Guix is well-known as a package manager, for the high quality of its packages, and for the strong reproducibility guarantees it provides. But, it is much less appreciated for its services, system definitions and deployment features. That's such a shame since these features can let you summon and dismiss entire systems at will - be they bare-metal or virtualized - with nothing but a declarative plain text configuration file.

In this talk, Arun will speak about guix-forge, a Guix channel that provides Guix services for easy setup and maintenance of a software forge. guix-forge uses existing free software such as cgit and/or klaus for serving git repositories on the web, laminar and webhook for continuous integration, uacme for managing TLS certificates, etc.

QA (on guix-forge) and open discussion (on anything Guix related) after the talk.

About

For any question, please get in touch via any of the following channels:

- Arun: arunisaac@systemreboot.net
- Fabio: me@fabionatali.com and https://octodon.social/@fabionatali
- Guix Devel mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guix-devel/

Guix London has no official ties with the Guix project. We commit to promote the project and to always operate with the best intentions; any mistake that we might make is due to us, Guix London, not the Guix project.

Code of conduct

We, Guix London's organisers, intend to create an open, friendly, and safe environment where people from the most diverse backgrounds can get together, learn about, teach, and discuss Guix and related topics in a welcoming and constructive way.

To this end, Guix London adheres to the Guix project's official Code of Conduct, as published at this link. Please make sure you familiarise with the document and that you share its principles, before attending our events.

Should you - at any time before, during, or after one of our events - want to raise an issue or discuss any CoC-related topic, please do not hesitate to reach out to the organisers at the contacts below.

- Arun Isaac, arunisaac@systemreboot.net
- Fabio Natali, me@fabionatali.com

Get involved

Should you be interested in becoming a Guix London organiser, please let us know. It'd be great to have you onboard. No previous Guix knowledge is required. If you're interested (or simply want to know more), do not hesitate to reach out to us!

Similarly, if you want to present on any Guix-related topic at one of our events, that's also great. We'd love to hear from you.

Image credits

Logo by Luis Felipe López Acevedo; background image by Taylor Vick on Unsplash.