Getting Nixpkgs

Nixpkgs is free software, released under a permissive MIT/X11 license.

Note: if you are a NixOS user, you already have Nixpkgs. (The files are in /etc/nixos/nixpkgs.) You can update your copy of Nixpkgs to the latest version by running nixos-checkout.

Channel

The usual way to obtain Nixpkgs is to subscribe to the Nixpkgs channel, which always contains the latest version of Nixpkgs:

$ nix-channel --add \
    http://nixos.org/releases/nixpkgs/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
$ nix-channel --update

After this, you can use nix-env to install available packages.

Download

If you want a source tarball, you can download one from our continuous build system:

Old releases

The following old releases of Nixpkgs are available:

2010-02-05Nixpkgs 0.13
2009-04-24Nixpkgs 0.12
2007-09-11Nixpkgs 0.11
2006-10-12Nixpkgs 0.10
2006-01-31Nixpkgs 0.9
2005-04-11Nixpkgs 0.8
2005-03-14Nixpkgs 0.7
2004-11-14Nixpkgs 0.6
2004-05-03Nixpkgs 0.5.1
2004-04-27Nixpkgs 0.5