Applications

This article lists applications built for and with Nix; it constitutes a listing of what may be called the Extended Nix Ecosystem.

Nix Derivatives

Various applications built on top of Nix:

• fractalide - Reusable Reproducible Composable Software
• not-os - build a system firmware for embedded devices

Built with Nix

Projects which leverage Nix.

• nix-bitcoin - Set of NixOS modules to install a bitcoin node with emphasis on security
• styx - Static site generator in Nix expression language
• bionix - manage and execute bioinformatics pipelines

Nix Platform

Projects which add support (e.g. for extra platforms or major capabilities) to Nix.

• nix-darwin - NixOS modules for Darwin
• musnix - real-time audio modules for NixOS
• nixGl - A wrapper to run OpenGL applications outside of NixOS

Nix Tooling

Various tools built for working with the Nix Ecosystem (e.g. enhancements or alternatives to core Nix tools).

General configuration

• home-manager - System for managing a user environment using Nix

Flakes

• DevOS - Popular flake-based NixOS configuraton template, building on several libraries
• dotfiles - Popular flake-based NixOS configuration template. Has hey management command
• deploy-rs - Nix flake deployment tool
• digga - Flake utility library, based on flake-utils-plus
• flake-utils-plus - Flake templates and helper library. Extension of below
• flake-utils - Set of flake-building utility functions

Toolboxes

• nox - Tools to make Nix easier to use
• nix-update - Swiss army knife for updating nix packages
• nix-venient - A collection of convenient commands for working with nix/nixpkgs

Archives

• narfuse - FUSE filesystem for mounting Nix archive (NAR) files as a virtual Nix store

Clustering

• nix-delegate - Convenient utility for distributed Nix builds

Comparison

• nix-diff - Compare Nix derivations
• niff - Compare two Nix expressions to determine what attributes changes

Dependencies

• nix-visualize - Visualize the dependencies of a given package
• niv - Painless dependencies for Nix projects

Nix lang comprehension

• rnix-lsp - A language server which can provide in your text editor...
  • Syntax checking, completion, renaming, go to definition, code formatting (with nixpkgs-fmt), etc.
  • Supported in vim/neovim, Emacs, VSCode, Kakoune
• nixfmt - A formatter for Nix code
• deadnix - Removes unused code from .nix files

Package maintenance

• nix-upgrade-scripts - Tools for Nixpkgs maintainers to upgrade packages
• nixpkgs-review - Review nixpkgs pull requests

Search

• nix-index - Quickly locate nix packages with specific files
• nix-du - Find which gc-roots take disk space in a nix store
• nix-info - Homebrew info querying for Nix
• userscan - Scans directories containing manually compiled programs and registers them with the Nix garbage collector

Shell

• nix-bash-completions - Bash completion for nix* commands
• nixos-shell (Mic92) - Spawns lightweight nixos vms in a shell (like vagrant)
• nixos-shell (chrisfarms) - like nix-shell, but for NixOS modules. Buildable version can be found in this fork
• extra-container - Run declarative NixOS containers from the command line. Similar to nixos-shell (chrisfarms)

Other

• nix-bundle - package Nix attributes into single-file executables.
• nix-user-chroot - install Nix as an unpriviliged user on any system

Nix Operations

Operations tools for the Nix Ecosystem:

Official

• Hydra - Nix's official continuous integration and build system.
• NixOps - Nix's official tool for deploying to NixOS machines in a network or the cloud.

Deployment

• colmena - a NixOS deployment tool
• deploy-rs - a simple multi-profile Nix-flake deploy tool
• Hail - a service for pull-based continuous deployment.
• Morph - a NixOS deployment tool
• nixcloud-webservices - nixpkgs extension for web-related technologies

Docker

• Arion - configure Docker Compose with Nix modules
• Nixery - ad-hoc container images from Nix

Kubernetes

• kubenix - Kubernetes resource builder written in Nix
• nix-kubernetes - Kubernetes deployment manager written in nix

Microservices

• Disnix - a microservice architecture built with Nix.

NixOps related

• nixops-manager - NixOps wrapper for Git repositories
• krops - a stateless alternative to nixops with improved secret management.
• morph - a stateless alternative to nixops, deployment files mostly compatible to nixops's none backend

Alternative nix implementations & parser

• hnix (haskell, parser & evaluator)
• rnix (rust, parser)
• go-nix (go, parser & nix-compatible file hasher)
• nix-idea (java, parser)

See also

• Language-specific package helpers
• Alternative Package Sets
• Get inspiration from other peoples NixOS configuration
• NixOS Packages Search for searching through NixOS packages