Nix ecosystem

The Nix Ecosystem is a collection of technologies designed to reproducibly build and declaratively configure and manage packages and systems as well as their dependencies. It achieves this by translating the functional paradigm from the program to the system domain by utilizing a dynamic, functional and lazy DSL called the Nix Expression Language for specifying reproducible builds.

Core Components of the Nix Ecosystem:

Component	Description	Usecases
Nix Package Manager	A package manager that parses Nix expressions specifying reproducible build, putting the result in a store address with a hash of the dependency tree, sidestepping dependency hell and supporting multiversion installs and rollbacks.	Package management in Linux & Darwin • Reproducible Builds
NixOS	A Linux distribution with all components built by Nix, and thus supporting reproducible and declarative system-wide configuration management as well as atomic upgrades and rollbacks.	Declarative System Configuration • Desktops • Servers • Clusters
Nixpkgs	The largest community maintained Nix package and NixOS module repository; standard releases of NixOS are hosted here.	Sharing Nix Packages & NixOS Modules • Developing NixOS
NixOps	A Nix based deployment and provisioning tool allowing declarative specification of remote NixOS systems, VMs and containers; supports AWS, Hetzner, GCE and some other cloud providers out of box.	Deployment & provisioning to NixOS systems, VMs & containers
Hydra	A Nix based continuous build system.	Build farms • Continuous integration

In addition there are many other applications developed by the Nix community, utilizing and supporting these core technologies.

File:Nixos-stack2.png