Nix
Contents
What is Nix?
I recently started using Nix. It is a package manager and a build system. It uses its own functional programming language. At the moment I use it only as a package manager. For years, I maintained Ansible playbook for setting up my development environments. Nix allows to simplify it and eventually might even replace it. Instead of installing software via apt/pipx/downloading binaries from GitHub I use Nix.
Niv sounds interesting but I haven’t tried it out yet.
Installing Nix
There any many ways to install nix. I decided to use nix-installer from DeterminateSystems.
- Install nix via nix-installer: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/releases/latest/download/nix-installer-x86_64-linux
- Add
/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/binand~/.nix-profile/bintoPATH
Install software package
nix profile install nixpkgs#NAME
Remove software package
nix profile list # check number
nix profile remove 42 # number from the list
Clean-up old packages
nix-collect-garbage -d
Upgrade all packages that were installed using an unlocked flake reference
nix profile upgrade '.*'
Installing directly from nixpkgs repo
cd pkgs/by-name/ex/example
nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; callPackage ./package.nix {}'
nix profile install $(readlink result)
Some articles about Nix:
- Zero to Nix https://zero-to-nix.com/
- Some notes on using nix https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/
- How do Nix builds work? https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/03/03/how-do-nix-builds-work-/
- One Week of NixOS https://www.codyhiar.com/blog/one-week-of-nixos/
- Nix – taming Unix with functional programming https://tweag.io/blog/2022-07-14-taming-unix-with-nix/
- My First Impressions of Nix https://mtlynch.io/notes/nix-first-impressions/