Caveats

Reverted paid features

There has been reports of paid features configuration being reverted by the app on the first launch due to the user being signed out of their account.

Although users can login to their GitKraken account from within the application, we recommend using the gk-login package — which comes with NixKraken — to sign in with GitKraken.

gk-login currently supports signing in to GitKraken through the following OAuth providers:

  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • BitBucket
  • Azure
  • Google

The security implications of using gk-login are the same as using the application, since it is replicating the code used by GitKraken. Also, the code can easily be reviewed and is thoroughly documented.

⚡ Key takeaway

To prevent paid features to be reverted on first launch, use gk-login.

Mutability

Although NixKraken allows to configure GitKraken using Nix language, the resulting configuration is not immutable.

Contrary to lots of other application modules provided by Home Manager, NixKraken does not use Nix capabilities to write the configuration file.

This is due to GitKraken using the configuration files to store application state alongside options. Therefore, if the configuration files were not writable, the application would fail to work as expected.

The module instead uses various Bash scripts to safely update the configuration files without overwriting application state.

This also means that there can be a configuration drift between the application and the Nix code. This is a known issue which will require users to refrain updating the configuration in-app and instead use NixKraken options.

⚡ Key takeaway

To avoid configuration drift, always make changes to the Nix configuration, not in the GitKraken UI.

Let NixKraken be the single source of truth for GitKraken settings.

Long installation time

GitKraken being closed source, end users will always have to build the package. Although this process is usually not very long, since GitKraken is not built from sources, building the package is still longer than fetching a pre-built binary.

Plus, there has been reports of "stuck" builds in the past. This is most often due to a combination of several factors:

⚡ Key takeaway

To dramatically speed up the installation process, we highly recommend to setup NixKraken's binary cache.