alt.hn

5/28/2026 at 11:36:41 PM

Garnix (A Nix CI) is shutting down

 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/garnix-is-shutting-down-not-oc/77895

by agnishom

5/29/2026 at 5:08:00 AM

Congrats to the team!

To all Garnix users: NixCI is very similar so I'd like to welcome you to try it out.

Demo: https://nix-ci.com/demo

Comparison: https://nix-ci.com/comparison/garnix

by Norfair

5/29/2026 at 5:45:40 AM

Was looking for an alternative myself but seems like there's no free tier? (Garnix had a rather generous one.)

I don't mind self hosting the workers (because my use cases are just in my homelab) but I need to contact you for that? Why isn't that just openly documented?

by 6ak74rfy

5/29/2026 at 6:19:27 AM

Note that Garnix is more than a CI system. It also allows for hosting apps with a quite brilliant and AFAIK unique solution to interdependencies. https://garnix.io/blog/call-by-hash/

by catelm

5/29/2026 at 2:29:50 AM

Was this named by a German? "Gar nichts", pronounced as "Gar Nix", means "absolutely nothing".

by storus

5/29/2026 at 4:07:25 AM

At least for Nix itself, that's pretty much it except via Dutch.

> The name Nix is derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing; build actions do not see anything that has not been explicitly declared as an input

From page 81 of the original paper: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

by efskap

5/29/2026 at 6:14:36 AM

Also, I think the founder's username in various places is nixnut. Which to an English-only speaker means someone crazy about Nix (Nix fan). However in Dutch 'niksnut' or 'nietsnut' loosely translates to 'bum'.

by microtonal

5/29/2026 at 4:37:51 AM

That's surprising; nix is Latin for snow, and its logo is a snow flake, so I just assumed it was that.

by yjftsjthsd-h

5/29/2026 at 1:00:40 PM

I don't think the logo choice is a coincidence, either; it's just that the ordering is different.

by isityettime

5/29/2026 at 3:19:33 AM

One team member is named Sönke Hahn, so it seems likely.

by aidenn0

5/29/2026 at 8:48:33 AM

"gar" is a useful amplifying prefix in German that can be used in all kinds of situations and I think it lacks a direct equivalent in English. Unlike totally, for example, gar can only stand alone in very specific contexts and usually is used more like an intensifying prefix.

So garnix would be the total and utter nothing.

by weinzierl

5/29/2026 at 12:43:33 AM

For the lazy: bought by Shopify, apparently

by isityettime

5/29/2026 at 1:26:13 AM

Back to Nix again? I remember one of their employees had a great video series on it, but then they stopped using it because it was too complicated.

by tripdout

5/29/2026 at 2:23:06 AM

Yeah, they gave a talk about it at NixCon last year:

https://talks.nixcon.org/nixcon-2025/talk/UPHTPD/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzjKCIqUVk

I don't remember all of the details, so if you're curious you should watch the talk. :)

But IIRC the main points that differentiated this new effort from the old one were that (1) there was buy-in from the very top of the company, (2) they took a more incremental approach where the old one was more all-or-nothing, and (3) they tackled the edge cases and hardest repos first.

The talk includes some info about the failings of their first effort as well. It's worth a watch.

by isityettime

5/29/2026 at 12:48:45 AM

good for the team, bad for the community.

by xiaoyu2006

5/29/2026 at 1:28:24 AM

but the community still gets the source code, kudos to the Garnix team!

by khuedoan

5/29/2026 at 2:25:09 AM

Good point. Really graceful way to transition, and it definitely offsets the loss. Maybe in some ways it'll end up being a net gain, who knows?

by isityettime

5/29/2026 at 12:51:13 AM

Yeah. I'm happy for them. But I'm also sad, because clouds are awful in terms of the way they handle state, and Garnix was paving the way towards something better.

by isityettime

5/29/2026 at 12:11:02 AM

Garnix was one of the interesting, declarative ones. We need more of these.

by esafak

5/29/2026 at 12:56:03 AM

Luckily they seem to have open-sourced it [0], so it should still be able to serve this use case, and help others develop in the future.

[0]: https://github.com/garnix-io/garnix-ci

by promiseofbeans

5/29/2026 at 1:08:48 AM

Hate to see it, but glad they're at open-sourcing it.

by arikrahman

5/29/2026 at 1:13:32 AM

Tobi loves Nix.

by nish__

5/29/2026 at 1:14:47 AM

truth

by xal

5/29/2026 at 4:05:49 AM

This is surprising.

I would have thought this would be a commercially viable business.

Such a bummer.

by colesantiago

5/29/2026 at 4:14:35 AM

Presumably it was and they got acqui-hired.

by tikhonj

5/29/2026 at 12:03:33 AM

All clouds / serverless will end up like this. It's a matter of "when", not "if"

by sufehmi

5/29/2026 at 1:47:30 AM

Agreed. Not gonna lie, I am upset and angry to see small companies disappear and be eaten up by larger ones. But I praise them for not building in any vendor lock-in. And I also appreciate them for open-sourcing their toolchain

by agnishom

5/29/2026 at 8:20:10 AM

Yeh... This month has been especially tough. I'm both a customer of cirrus labs (now bought up by OpenAI) and garnix (now bought up by Shopify) and I'm scared that whatever competitor I switch to is also just gonna get bought out.

Now I have two CI providers to replace by the end of the Quarter

Sigh

by arianvanp

5/29/2026 at 5:11:29 AM

[dead]

by haeseong