Nix Ecosystem

• Written in 2003 by Eelco Dolstra in his PhD thesis
• https://status.nixos.org/
• https://search.nixos.org
• https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/
• https://nix.dev/

Pieces

• Nix

• The functional package manager

• Nixpkgs

• The packages collection
• The packages can be installed with the nix package manager

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

• NixOS

• A Linux distribution that can be configured fully declaratively

• Nix Language

• It is a domain-specific, purely functional, lazily evaluated, dynamically typed programming language

Nix Package Manager

• Nix configuration at /etc/nix/nix.conf

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

NixOS

• Available NixOS options: https://search.nixos.org/options

Filesystem

• /bin
• Contains a single sh binary symlinked to nixstore
• /etc

Nix Store

• Packages are installed at /nix/store/
• Each path has a unique SHA-256 hash

├── /nix/store/lgr3n0573wi478bj456zggh541wjrbiw-git-2.46.0
│   ├── bin
│   ├── lib
│   ├── libexec
│   ├── share
│   └── scalar

• NixOS installed packages are also located at nix-store, but symlinked to /run/current-system/sw/