Nix Guides

Welcome to Nix Guides! With this set of guides targetted at new Nix users, we hope to give a gentle introduction to the Nix universe.

Our goal is to have a set of guides that take you, the end-user, through all the steps you need in a sequential order to accomplish certain tasks. The Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOs manuals are great as reference manuals, but are to detailed to use as learning material.

Why bother learning Nix?

We believe that Nix has a unique value proposition.It offers declarative specifications of software packages, machine configurations and even cloud resources. Because of these declarative specifications, we have repreducible builds, not just of software packages, but also of complete machines and cluster configurations 1. This can be used to have identical environments in production and development, and among the different machines used by developers. It is reliable, by not ever replacing components. This makes atomic upgrades and rollbacks easy and safe, in contrast to most distributions, where updates can break the OS if it's interrupted at the wrong time.

If you're completely new to Nix, we recommend to take a quick peek at the Overview, and then follow the Getting Started Tutorial. From there on you can pick any guide in any order you like.

  1. Cluster configurations are modulo dynamic settings that depend on the cluster environment, such as the IP address assigned to a VM. ↩