Awesome Nix

A curated list of the best resources in the Nix community.

Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible.

Please read the contribution guidelines before contributing.

Contents

• Resources
  • Learning
  • Discovery
• Installation Media
• Channel History
• Deployment Tools
• Virtualisation
• Command-Line Tools
• Development
• DevOps
• Programming Languages
  • Arduino
  • Clojure
  • Crystal
  • Elixir
  • Elm
  • Gleam
  • Haskell
  • Haxe
  • Julia
  • Lean
  • Node.js
  • OCaml
  • PHP
  • PureScript
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Rust
  • Scala
  • Zig
• NixOS Modules
• NixOS Configuration Editors
• Overlays
• Distributions
• Community

Resources

Learning

• Building a Rust service with Nix - An in-depth blog series about creating a Rust application with Nix.
• Explainix - Explain Nix syntax visually.
• How to Learn Nix - It's like a Let's Play, but for obscure software documentation.
• Nix - A One Pager - A one page introduction to the Nix language.
• nix-book - A comprehensive guide to NixOS hardening and configuration.
• Nix from First Principles: Flake Edition - A modern crash-course to using Nix features, Flakes, and developing with Nix.
• Nix in 100 Seconds - A YouTube video from Fireship presenting Nix in 100 seconds.
• Nix Notes - A collection of short notes about Nix, each contributing to the same virtual machine image.
• Nix Pills - The best way to learn, with examples.
• Nix Shorts - A collection of short notes about how to use Nix, updated for Nix Flakes.
• Nix Starter Config - A few simple Nix Flake templates for getting started with NixOS + home-manager.
• nix.dev - An opinionated guide for developers about getting things done using the Nix ecosystem.
• NixOS & Flakes Book - An unofficial and opinionated NixOS & Flakes book for beginners.
• NixOS Asia Tutorial Series - A series of high-level tutorials on using Nix Flakes, NixOS, home-manager, etc.
• NixOS in Production - Free (pay-what-you-want) book in pdf format.
• Unofficial NixOS test driver manual - Opinionated unofficial NixOS test driver manual with quick getting started guides and best practices.
• Official Nix manual - Latest stable version of the official Nix manual, best used as reference guide. Receives updates when available.
• Official NixOS manual - Latest stable version of the official NixOS manual, mix of tutorial and reference guide. Receives updates when available.
• Official Nixpkgs manual - Latest stable version of the official Nixpkgs reference manual. Receives updates when available.
• Tour of Nix - An online interactive tutorial on Nix language constructs.
• Wombat's Book of Nix - A book-length introduction to Nix and flakes.
• Zero to Nix - A flake-centric guide to Nix and its concepts created by Determinate Systems to quickly onboard beginners.

Discovery

• Home Manager Option Search - Search through all 2000+ Home Manager options and read how to use them.

• Nix Package Versions - Find all versions of a package that were available in a channel and the revision you can download it from.
• Nix Software - Friendly package search. Supports logos, screenshots, categories, and translations into multiple languages.
• nix-search-tv - CLI fuzzy finder for packages and options from Nixpkgs, Home Manager, and more.
• Noogle - Nix API search engine allowing to search functions based on their types and other attributes.
• NüschtOS Search - Simple and fast static-page NixOS option search.
• Searchix - Search Nix packages and options from NixOS, Darwin and Home Manager.

Installation Media

• nix-installer-scripts - Runs the official installer but does some tweaking as well such as adding fcontext for selinux and installing nix outside of the default profile so you don't accidently uninstall it.
• nix-installer - Opinionated alternative to the official Nix install scripts.
• nixos-anywhere - Install NixOS everywhere via SSH.
• nixos-generators - Take a NixOS config and build multiple different images types including VirtualBox VMs, Azure images, and installation ISOs.
• nixos-infect - Replace a running non-NixOS Linux host with NixOS.
• nixos-up - Super easy NixOS installer that can be used from the installation ISO.

Channel History

• npc - CLI to view and bisect Nixpkgs channel history.
• Nix Infra Status - Get the age and current Git commit of each Nix channel.
• Nix Review Tools Reports - Reports showing problematic dependencies (dependencies causing the most failed builds) for major Hydra jobsets.

• nixpkgs PR tracker - A tracker for whether a PR has made it into a channel yet.

Deployment Tools

• bento - A KISS deployment tool to keep your NixOS fleet (servers & workstations) up to date.
• Clan - A peer-to-peer deployment tool with inbuilt support for secrets and a module system to manage distributed networks.
• Colmena - A simple, stateless NixOS deployment tool modeled after NixOps and morph.
• comin - A deployment tool to continuously pull from Git repositories.
• deploy-rs - A simple multi-profile Nix-flake deploy tool.
• krops - A lightweight toolkit to deploy NixOS systems, remotely or locally.
• KubeNix - A Kubernetes resource builder using Nix.
• KuberNix - Single-dependency Kubernetes clusters via Nix packages.
• morph - A tool for managing existing NixOS hosts.
• Nixery - A Docker-compatible container registry which builds images ad-hoc via Nix.
• Nixinate - A Nix flake library to provide app outputs for managing existing NixOS hosts over SSH.
• Nixlets - Like Helm but using only Nix, uses Kubenix under the hood.
• NixOps - The official Nix deployment tool, compatible with AWS, Hetzner, and more.
• pushnix - Simple cli utility that pushes NixOS configuration and triggers a rebuild using ssh.
• terraform-nixos - A set of Terraform modules designed to deploy NixOS.
• terranix - Use Nix and the NixOS module system to write your Terraform code.

Virtualisation

• agent-sandbox.nix - Declarative sandboxing for any package (e.g. AI coding agents) using bubblewrap on Linux and sandbox-exec on macOS.
• extra-container - Run declarative NixOS containers from the command line.
• microvm - NixOS-based MicroVMs.
• nixos-shell - Simple headless VM configuration using Nix (similar to Vagrant).

Command-Line Tools

• alejandra - An opinionated Nix code formatter optimized for speed and consistency.
• angrr - Auto Nix GC Roots Retention. This tool simply deletes auto GC roots based on the modified time of their symbolic link target.
• comma - Quickly run any binary; wraps together nix run and nix-index.
• deadnix - Scan Nix files for dead code.
• devenv - A Nix-based tool for creating developer shell environments quickly and reproducibly.
• dix - Diff Nix; a super-fast tool to diff Nix related things.
• manix - Find configuration options and function documentation for Nixpkgs, NixOS, and Home Manager.
• nh - Better output for nix, nixos-rebuild, home-manager and nix-darwin CLI leveraging dix and nix-output-monitor.
• nix-alien - Run unpatched binaries on Nix/NixOS easily.
• nix-diff - A tool to explain why two Nix derivations differ.
• nix-du - Visualise which gc-roots to delete to free some space in your Nix store.
• nix-index - Quickly locate Nix packages with specific files.
• nix-init - Generate Nix packages from URLs with hash prefetching, dependency inference, license detection, and more.
• nix-melt - A ranger-like flake.lock viewer.
• nix-output-monitor - A tool to produce useful graphs and statistics when building derivations.
• nix-prefetch - A universal tool for updating source checksums.
• nix-tree - Interactively browse the dependency graph of Nix derivations.
• nixfmt - A formatter for Nix code, intended to easily apply a uniform style.
• nixos-cli - Configurable all-in-one CLI for common NixOS tools with an emphasis on improved user experience.
• nixpkgs-hammering - An opinionated linter for Nixpkgs package expressions.
• nurl - Generate Nix fetcher calls from repository URLs.
• nvd - Diff package versions between two store paths; it's especially useful for comparing NixOS generations on rebuild.
• optnix - A terminal-based options searcher for Nix module systems.
• statix - A linter/fixer to check for and fix antipatterns in Nix code.

Development

• Arion - Run docker-compose with help from Nix/NixOS.
• attic - Multi-tenant Nix Binary Cache.
• cached-nix-shell - A nix-shell replacement that uses caching to open subsequent shells quickly.
• Cachix - Hosted binary cache service; free for open-source projects.
• compose2nix - Generate a NixOS config from a Docker Compose project.
• Conflake - A batteries included, autoload files, convention-based configuration framework for flake.nix.
• Devbox - Instant, portable, and predictable development environments.
• devshell - mkShell with extra bits and a toml config option to be able to onboard non-nix users.
• dream2nix - A framework for automatically converting packages from other build systems to Nix.
• flake-edit - Edit your flake inputs with auto-follows and update functionality directly from the CLI.
• flake-utils-plus - A lightweight Nix library flake for painless NixOS flake configuration.
• flake-utils - Pure Nix flake utility functions to help with writing flakes.
• flake.parts - Minimal Nix modules framework for Flakes: split your flakes into modules and get things done with community modules.
• flakelight - A modular flake framework aiming to minimize boilerplate.
• flox - Manage and share development environments, package projects, and publish artifacts anywhere.
• gitignore.nix - The most feature-complete and easy-to-use .gitignore integration.
• haumea - Filesystem-based module system for the Nix language similar to traditional programming languages, with support for file hierarchy and visibility.
• lorri - A much better nix-shell for development that augments direnv.
• make-shell - mkShell meets modules, a modular almost-drop-in replacement for pkgs.mkShell function.
• MCP-NixOS - An MCP server that provides AI assistants with accurate information about NixOS packages, options, Home Manager, and nix-darwin configurations.
• namaka - Snapshot testing for Nix based on haumea.
• nil - NIx Language server, an incremental analysis assistent for writing in Nix.
• niv - Easy dependency management for Nix projects with package pinning.
• nix2container - An efficient container building workflow with Nix.
• nix-direnv - A fast loader and flake-compliant configuration for the direnv environment auto-loader.
• nix-health - A program to check the health of your Nix install. Furthermore, individual projects can configure their own health checks in their flake.nix.
• nix-oci - A flake-parts module for building minimal, reproducible OCI containers using nix2container.
• nix-update - Update versions/source hashes of nix packages.
• nixd - Nix language server, based on Nix libraries.
• nixpkgs-review - The best tool to verify that a pull-request in Nixpkgs is building properly.
• Nixtest - Testing framework for Nix, with snapshot and unit test support, JUnit generation etc.
• npins - A simple tool for handling different types of dependencies in a Nix project. It is inspired by and comparable to Niv.
• pog - A new, powerful way to do bash scripts. Pog is a powerful Nix library that transforms the way developers create command-line interfaces (CLIs).
• pre-commit-hooks.nix - Run linters/formatters at commit time and on your CI.
• rnix-lsp - A syntax-checking language server for Nix.
• robotnix - A declarative and reproducible build system for Android (AOSP) images.
• services-flake - A NixOS-like service configuration framework for Nix flakes.
• Snowfall Lib - A library that makes it easy to manage your Nix flake by imposing an opinionated file structure.
• templates - Project templates for many languages using Nix flakes.
• treefmt-nix - A formatter that allows formatting all your project files with a single command, all via a single .nix file.

DevOps

• Nix GitLab CI - Define GitLab CI pipelines in pure Nix with full access to all Nix packages (incl. caching).
• nixidy - Kubernetes GitOps with Nix and Argo CD.
• Standard - An opinionated Nix Flakes framework to keep Nix code in large projects organized, accompanied by a friendly CLI/TUI optized for DevOps scenarios.

Programming Languages

Arduino

• nixduino - Nix-based tool to help build Arduino sketches.

Clojure

• clj-nix - Nix helper functions for Clojure projects.

Crystal

• crystal2nix - Convert shard.lock into Nix expressions.

Elixir

• deps_nix - Converts Mix dependencies to Nix derivations.

Elm

• elm2nix - Convert elm.json into Nix expressions.

Gleam

• nix-gleam - Generic Nix builder for Gleam applications.

Haskell

• cabal2nix - Converts a Cabal file into a Nix build expression.
• haskell-flake - A flake-parts Nix module for Haskell development.
• haskell.nix - Alternative Haskell Infrastructure for Nixpkgs.
• nix-haskell-mode - Automatic Haskell setup in Emacs.
• nixkell - A Haskell project template using Nix and direnv.

Haxe

• haxix - Nix flake to build haxe/Heaps.io projects.
• kebab - Haxe packages for Nix.

Julia

• Manifest2Nix.jl - A Nix library for creating reproducible Julia builds and experiments via precompilation.

Lean

• lean4-nix - Nix flake build for Lean 4, and lake2nix.

Node.js

• Napalm - Support for building npm packages in Nix with a lightweight npm registry.
• node2nix - Generate Nix expression from a package.json (or package-lock.json) (to be stored as files).
• npmlock2nix - Generate Nix expressions from a package-lock.json (in-memory), primarily for web projects.

OCaml

• opam2nix - Generate Nix expressions from opam packages.

PHP

• composer-plugin-nixify - Composer plugin to help with Nix packaging.
• composer2nix - Generate Nix expressions to build composer packages.
• composition-c4 - Support for building composer packages from a composer.lock (using IFD).
• nix-phps - Flake containing old and unmaintained PHP versions (intended for CI use).
• nix-shell - Nix shells for PHP development.

PureScript

• Easy PureScript Nix - A project to easily use PureScript and other tools with Nix.
• purs-nix - CLI and library combo designed for managing PureScript projects using Nix. It provides a Nix API that can be used within your projects, as well as a command-line interface for managing your development process.

Python

• poetry2nix - Build Python packages directly from Poetry's poetry.lock. No conversion step needed.
• uv2nix - Convert uv workspaces into pure Nix derivations.

Ruby

• Bundix - Generates a Nix expression for your Bundler-managed application.
• ruby-nix - Generates reproducible ruby/bundler app environment with Nix.

Rust

• cargo2nix - Granular caching, development shell, Nix & Rust integration.
• crane - A Nix library for building Cargo projects with incremental artifact caching.
• fenix - Rust toolchains and Rust analyzer nightly for nix.
• naersk - Build Rust packages directly from Cargo.lock. No conversion step needed.
• nix-cargo-integration - A library that allows easy and effortless integration for Cargo projects.
• rust-nix-templater - Generates Nix build and development files for Rust projects.

Scala

• sbt-derivation - mkDerivation for sbt, similar to buildGoModule.

Zig

• zig2nix - Flake for packaging, building and running Zig projects.
• zon2nix - Convert the dependencies in build.zig.zon to a Nix expression.

NixOS Modules

• base16.nix - Flake way to theme programs in base16 colorschemes, mustache template support included.
• Home Manager - Manage your user configuration just like NixOS.
• impermanence - Lets you choose what files and directories you want to keep between reboots.
• musnix - Do real-time audio work in NixOS.
• nix-bitcoin - Modules and packages for Bitcoin nodes with higher-layer protocols with an emphasis on security.
• nix-darwin - Manage macOS configuration just like on NixOS.
• nix-mineral - Conveniently and reasonably harden NixOS.
• nix-topology - Generate infrastructure and network diagrams directly from your NixOS configuration.
• NixOS hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware.
• NixOS-WSL - Modules for running NixOS on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
• Nixvim - A pre-packaged Neovim distribution built with Nix modules and Nixpkgs.
• nvf - A portable, modular Neovim configuration framework for Nix.
• Self Host Blocks - Modular server management based on NixOS modules and focused on best practices.
• Simple Nixos Mailserver - A complete mailserver, managed with NixOS modules.
• Stylix - System-wide colorscheming and typography for NixOS.

NixOS Configuration Editors

Desktop apps

• Nix Software Center - Install and manage Nix packages. Desktop app in Rust and GTK.
• NixOS Configuration Editor - Graphical editor for NixOS configuration. Desktop app in Rust and GTK.

Webinterface

• MyNixOS - Graphical editor for Nix flakes. Create and manage configurations and modules for NixOS and Nix home-manager. Rather a Nix generator than a Nix editor, because it does not allow to import Nix files.

Overlays

• awesome-nix-hpc - High Performance Computing package sets.
• neovim-nightly-overlay - Daily bumped Neovim nightly package.
• nixpkgs-firefox-darwin - Automatically updated Firefox binary packages for macOS.
• nixpkgs-mozilla - Mozilla's overlay with Rust toolchains and Firefox.
• nixpkgs-wayland - Bleeding-edge Wayland packages.
• NUR - Nix User Repositories. The mother of all overlays, allowing access to user repositories and installing packages via attributes.
• rust-overlay - Pure and reproducible nix overlay of binary distributed Rust toolchains.
• System Manager - A non-NixOS Linux system configuration tool built on Nix.
• zig-overlay - A Nix flake packaging the Zig compiler. The flake mirrors the binaries built officially by Zig and does not build them from source.

Distributions

• nixbsd - A NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel.
• NixNG - A GNU/Linux distribution similar to NixOS. The defining difference is a focus on containers and lightweightness.
• SnowflakeOS - A NixOS-based Linux distribution focused on beginner friendliness and ease of use.

Community

• #nix:nixos.org
• #nixos on Libera.Chat
• Discord - Nix/Nixos (Unofficial)
• Discourse - The best place to get help and discuss Nix-related topics.
• NixCon - The annual community conference for contributors and users of Nix and NixOS.
• Wiki (Official)
• Wiki (Unofficial)