Resources

Note: Official Nix documentation and learning materials are maintained at nix.dev.

This article is an overview of resources available both within the NixOS community Wiki and elsewhere. For communication channels, support and information of contributing, see the community menu.

Wiki

The NixOS Wiki's core articles are divided into five categories. Each category link will list all pages in that category:

1. Pedias, for encyclopedic description
2. Guides, for broad hands-on understanding and connections to other learning resources
3. Tutorials, intended to teach a particular process or project
4. Cookbooks, collections of tips and tricks
5. Reference, full manuals and technical coverage

Pages are also organized by the six most prominent components of the Nix Ecosystem — NixOS, Nix: the package manager, Nix: the language (Nix Expressions), Nixpkgs, NixOps and Hydra.

NixOS Wiki Resources

Category	NixOS	Nix	Nix Expressions	Nixpkgs	NixOps	Hydra
Pedia	NixOS	Nix	Nix Expression Language	Nixpkgs	NixOps	Hydra
Cookbook	NixOS Cheatsheet	Nix Cookbook	Nix Language: Tips & Tricks
Guide			Nix Language: Learning resources

NixOS Official Resources

Category	NixOS	Nix	Nix Expressions	Nixpkgs	NixOps	Hydra
Reference	NixOS Manual	Nix Manual	Nix Manual: Writing Nix Expressions	Nixpkgs Manual	Nixops Manual	Hydra Manual

Note: Home Manager is also a major community project to make user environment management in NixOS easier. It is intended to replace much of what you would do with nix-env, to reduce hard-to-track imperative actions.
Official Home Manager manual

Also, see Applications for an overview of tools in the extended ecosystem.

More documentation

• awesome-nix - community-curated list of Nix learning resources and tools

News

• planet.nixos.org - Aggregator for blogs related to nix/nixOS
• NixOS Discourse

Interactive websites

• NixOS Packages Search - full-text search through all packages of NixOS
• NixOS Option Search - full-text search through all options of NixOS
• NixOS Code Search - full-text search through NixOS related packages
• A tour of nix - interactive Nix tutorial
• Nix Channel Status - when nixpkgs/nixos channels were updated last
• Hydra
• Nix Review Tools Reports - reports showing problematic dependencies for major Hydra jobsets

Tutorials

• How to learn Nix - A set of over 40 posts from 2021, looking at — as the author describes — not just what Nix does, but what it does. It is their notes from reading the manual, doing experiments, and trying to deeply understand Nix.
• Tutorial Introduction to Nix - An introduction focused on the use of shell environments, for Python and with links to R versions as well
• Interactive Tour of Nix - An interactive tutorial of the Nix Expression Language by Joachim Schiele and Paul Seitz
• Nix shell workshop
• Scrive workshop - Nix language and packaging workshop
• ZFS NAS
• NixOS & Flakes Book - An unofficial book for beginners - A beginner friendly tutorial about NixOS and Flakes. By Ryan Yin
• NixOS in Production - A NixOS handbook for professional use. By Gabriella Gonzalez

Video tutorials

• Wil T Nix Guides - A video series in 8 parts, covering the Nix ecosystem from foundations, providing orientation with all available resources, and showing hands on how to get NixOS installed and running (including managing all your configuration through git and using Flakes).
• Nix Friday - a series of 24 video streams of 1-2 hours on learning Nix and meeting community members
• The Nix Hour - A weekly beginner-oriented improvised QA-style lecture on Nix

Examples

• Configuration Collection
• Comparison of NixOS setups

Talks

• Summer of Nix 2022 Talks
• NixCon 2022 Talks
• NixCon 2020 Talks
• NixCon 2019 Talks
• NixCon 2018 Talks
• NixCon 2017 Talks
• NixCon 2015 Talks produced and hosted by the CCC Video Operation Center