Overview of the Nix Language

This discussion article covers the syntax, semantics, typing, compilation, tooling and libraries of the Nix Expression Language.

The Nix expression language is a pure, lazy, functional language. Purity means that operations in the language don't have side-effects (for instance, there is no variable assignment). Laziness means that arguments to functions are evaluated only when they are needed. Functional means that functions are “normal” values that can be passed around and manipulated in interesting ways. The language is not a full-featured, general purpose language. Its main job is to describe packages, compositions of packages, and the variability within packages.

— From the nix manual

The language was designed especially for the Nix Package Manager.

Language Paradigms

Lazy

Not all expressions in nixpkgs will be evaluated and instantiated as nix performs evaluation only when needed for a finished output. In the following example abort will never be triggered as the variable it belogs to is unused:

let
  a = abort "will never happen";
  b = "hello";
  c = "world"
in b + c

Functional

Functional Programming is a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. It is a declarative programming paradigm, which means programming is done with expressions or declarations instead of statements.

see also: [1]

Pure

A pure function is a function where the return value is only determined by its input values, without observable side effects. In Nix, all build operations try to be as pure as possible to achieve reproducible builds. This means that wherever you build the packages as few side effects as possible should have an impact onto the build.

Language Features

This section describes the main language features of the nix expression language

expressions

When Nix tutorials talk about Nix Expressions they typically mean the definition of a function with multiple inputs which as a result in a derivation. However a Nix expression can be everything, from a simple string, to function to a set of expressions.

types

The nix language provides a number of basic types:

Type	Description	Example
Strings	Strings either start with double quotes or double single quotes. They also support antiquotation (templating). Leading spaces are stripped with double single quotes.	"Say ${pkgs.hello.name}", ''first line second line ''
Integers	There is no float in the nix language	5
Path	relative paths will become to absolute when evaluated,paths must contain a slash. <nixpkgs/pkgs> is also possible and will resolve to the folder incl. subfolders in your NIX_PATH	./hello/world > /abs/path/to/hello/world <nixpkgs/lib> > /path/to/your/nixpkgs/lib
URI		http://example.org/foo.tar.bz2
Boolean		true,false
Null		null
Lists	items are not separated by comma, can contain any other type	[ 1 ./example.bin { hello="world"; }]
Sets	In other languages called dicts(py),objects(js) hashes(ruby), essentially a list of key-value pairs	{ hello="world"; }.hello > "world"
Functions	see below	pattern: body

A detailed description of all types can be found in The Nix manual

functions

Functions have the following form: pattern: body

There are 3 patterns in how functions can be written:

1. f = a: a*a; a single identifier, can be extended with multiple identifiers as f = a: b: a*b; as a partial function would be returned.
2. { x, y ? "foo", z ? "bar", ... }: z + y + x a set pattern, which can also set defaults. ellipse means that the function may receive extra arguments.
3. args@{ x, y, z, ... }: z + y + x + args.a an @ pattern which can be used to match extra arguments and store them in the args set.

imports

import loads, parses and imports the nix expression stored in path. This keyword is essentially a builtin of nix but not a part of the language itself.

Usage:

  x = import <nixpkgs> {};
  y = trace x.pkgs.hello.name x;

notable constructs

Nix looks a lot like JSON with functions but also provides a number of very specialized constructs which can help you build clean and easy to read expressions. In this sub-chapter the most notable constructs will be shown by example:

with statement

The with statement introduces the lexical scope of a set into the expression which follows. Common usages are: On top of expressions:

You will see the with statement a lot at the beginning of expression definition. Most of the time it is used to load the lib functions into the namespace for quick access.

{lib, ... }:

with lib;
{
  options = {
    networking.hosts = mkOption {
      type = with types; attrsOf ( listOf str);
      default = {};
    };
  };
  ...  
}

instead of:

{lib, ... }:
{
  options = {
    networking.hosts = lib.mkOption {
      type = lib.types.attrsOf ( lib.types.listOf lib.types.str);
      default = {};
    };
  };
  ...  
}

In package input definitions:

{pkgs}:
{
  ...
  buildInputs = with pkgs; [ curl php coreutils procps ffmpeg ];
}

Instead of :

{pkgs}:
{
  ...
  buildInputs = [ pkgs.curl pkgs.php pkgs.coreutils pkgs.procps pkgs.ffmpeg ];
}

In the package meta tag:

{stdenv, ...}:
{
  ...
  meta = with stdenv.lib; {
    license = with licenses; [ lgp3 gpl3 ];
    maintainers = with maintainers; [ adisbladis lassulus ];
  };
}

Instead of :

{stdenv, ...}:
{
  ...
  meta = {
    license = [ stdenv.lib.licenses.lgp3 stdenv.lib.licenses.gpl3 ];
    maintainers = [ stdenv.lib.maintainers.adisbladis stdenv.lib.maintainers.lassulus ];
  };
}

In a default.nix of an external package:

with import <nixpkgs> {};
stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
    name = "mytool-env";
    src = ./.;
    buildInputs = with pkgs;[
      python34
      python34Packages.docopt
    ];

    shellHook =''
      export HISTFILE=$PWD/histfile
    '' ;
}

let ... in statement

With let you can define local variables which can also reference to self without the need of the rec construct. This feature is use inside expressions to prepare variables which become part of an output. The usage of let is comparable to the Haskell let expression

let
  a = 1;
  b = 2;
in  a + b
=> 3

inherit statement

The inherit expression can be used to copy variables from the surrounding lexical scope. A typical use case is to declare the version or name of a derivation in the expression and reuse this parameter in the function to fetch the source.

This is a typical python package derivation as the fetchPypi function also requires pname and version as input:

buildPythonPackage rec {
  pname = "hello";
  version = "1.0";
  src = fetchPypi {
    inherit pname version;
   sha256 = "01ba..0";
  };
}

rec statement

The rec expression turns a basic set into a set where self-referencing is possible. This can be used when the let expression would create too much clutter. It is often seen in package derivation descriptions.

Sample usage:

rec {
  x = y - 100;
  y = 123;
}.x
=> 23

Learning Resources

The manual provides a reference of the Nix language. All language constructs you may use in nix are defined here, together with code snippets.

Nix By Example is a step-by-step tutorial. The nix pills also provide a lot of insight into the language and functional package management in general.

Development Tools

Syntax Highlighting & Editor Modes

Nix language has decent syntax highlighting (SH) support among popular code editors, but refactoring/autocomplete is still rare.

Reference: Editor Modes for Nix Files