Nixing your system: A guide to fun and profit

Nix is highly versatile tool for declarative builds, deployments, configuration and package management. The nix package registry contains more than 100000 packages, and nix lets you use all of them reliably.

Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they are reproducible and don’t have undeclared dependencies, so if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another.

Nix makes it trivial to share development and build environments for your projects, regardless of what programming languages and tools you’re using.

Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package cannot break other packages. It allows you to roll back to previous versions, and ensures that no package is in an inconsistent state during an upgrade.

With all that in mind, this session will include the following content.

1. A small demonstration of `nix-shell`
2. Installing packages with `nix profile`
3. A guide to the nix language
4. Nix derivations from scratch
5. Avoiding tedium with `mkDerivation`
6. Some practical examples where I used Nix

I plan to have slides alongside simple demos, encouraging the audience to learn more about it from the docs later.