[Nix-dev] /srv directory for storing site-specifc data served by the system

Sander van der Burg - EWI S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl
Wed Mar 16 23:14:27 CET 2011


Hi all,

I'm currently taking a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (http://www.pathname.com/fhs). Not that I want NixOS to adopt it completely (because we simply can't), but to have a look behind the rationale of some design decisions. Usually one of the big criticisms I receive about NixOS is that we don't comply with the FHS and I'd like to see what parts are useful for NixOS and which parts aren't (and to form an opinion why we choose to deviate and how we can achieve similar goals differently).

One thing I noticed is that the FHS describes a /srv directory (on page 15, section 3.16), for storing site-specific data of services. The directory structure is unspecified but you can structure it like:

/srv/www (for webserver files)
/srv/ftp (for anonymous FTP files)
/srv/subversion (containing subversion repositories)

and you can also have even deeper hierarchies, e.g.

/srv/www/domain-a
/srv/www/domain-b

When I was still doing Linux from Scratch I also used this directory, but in NixOS I put everything in /var or some other unknown location. I find it very convenient to use /srv. What do you think about the /srv directory?

-- Sander
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20110316/b9f2156e/attachment.html 


More information about the nix-dev mailing list