nix-wpe-webkit-bin

Prebuilt WPE WebKit binaries for Nix, published as GitHub Releases so you don't have to build WebKit from source yourself.

wpe-webkit-2.0 isn't packaged in nixpkgs at all, and a from-scratch build of it routinely takes multiple hours. This flake builds it once in CI and publishes the result as a release tarball; consuming flakes fetch that tarball instead of rebuilding, dropping the install time to seconds.

{
  inputs.nix-wpe-webkit-bin.url = "github:aayush2622/nix-wpe-webkit-bin";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, nix-wpe-webkit-bin, ... }: {
    # nix-wpe-webkit-bin.packages.${system}.default
    # resolves to a prebuilt fetch when one exists for your system,
    # falling back to a from-source build otherwise. Either way you get
    # the same wpe-webkit-2.0 pkg-config module and libraries.
  };
}

Or directly:

nix build github:aayush2622/nix-wpe-webkit-bin

Currently x86_64-linux only. aarch64-linux is declared in the flake so the output shape is consistent, but has no CI job publishing a prebuilt for it yet - it always builds from source until one is added. PRs adding that job are welcome.

Vendored from eval-exec/nix-wpe-webkit, the only known working from-source derivation for wpe-webkit-2.0 at the time this repo was created. It's a plain copy, not a fork with local patches - if upstream fixes something, that fix needs to be re-vendored here by hand (there's no automation for this yet).

.github/workflows/build.yml runs on push to main (when package.nix, flake.nix, or flake.lock change), on a weekly schedule, and on manual dispatch. Each run:

1. Builds wpewebkit-source for real, from scratch.
2. Merges every output (out, dev, devdoc) into one tree and tars it - a single-output tarball would be missing dev's headers and lib/pkgconfig/wpe-webkit-2.0.pc, which is exactly the bug an earlier version of this workflow shipped with.
3. Uploads that tarball to a GitHub Release tagged with the WebKit version.
4. Computes the release asset's Nix-compatible hash and commits it, along with the download URL, into versions.json.

flake.nix reads versions.json at eval time; if it has an entry for your system, packages.<system>.default fetches and unpacks that tarball via fetchurl instead of building. No entry yet (a fresh clone before the first CI run ever completes, or a new system nobody's published for) means it transparently falls back to wpewebkit-source - slower, but correct.

Don't just trust that CI went green - a successful build can still produce a tarball that's missing files a real consumer needs. Before trusting a new versions.json entry:

nix build github:aayush2622/nix-wpe-webkit-bin
ls result/lib/pkgconfig/wpe-webkit-2.0.pc   # must exist

If that file is missing, the tarball is incomplete - see step 2 above for why that happens and how the workflow guards against it now.