The Nix project
Welcome to the homepage of the Nix project, which consists of a number of related open source subprojects:
- Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it can ensure that an upgrade to one package cannot break others, that you can always roll back to previous version, that multiple versions of a package can coexist on the same system, and much more.
- Nixpkgs is a large collection of packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager.
- NixOS is a Nix-based Linux distribution. Thanks to Nix, it supports atomic upgrades, rollbacks and multi-user package management, and it has a declarative approach to system configuration management that makes it easy to reproduce a configuration on another machine.
- Hydra is a Nix-based continuous build system.
Latest News
| ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing | 2010/8/18 |
| The paper “Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010). It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the environment (such as remote machines, network topologies, system services or root privileges) can be written succinctly using declarative specifications of the machines needed by the test environment. From these specifications we can automatically instantiate (networks of) virtual machines. This is what we use for automated regression testing of NixOS itself. A draft of the paper is available. | |
| Xfce in NixOS | 2010/8/18 |
NixOS now supports Xfce, a
modern, light-weight desktop environment. It can be enabled by
setting the NixOS configuration value
services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable to
true. (Screenshot)
| |
| Nix 0.16 released | 2010/8/17 |
| Nix 0.16 has been released, featuring a much faster evaluator and support for configurable parallelism inside builders. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. | |
| NixOS talk at LSM | 2010/7/9 |
| Ludovic Courtès gave a talk about Nix and NixOS at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, entitled “NixOS: The Only Functional GNU/Linux Distribution” (slides). | |
| Nix 0.15 released | 2010/3/17 |
| Nix 0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. | |
