Gerenciador de pacotes Nix

Nix é um gerenciador de pacotes e sistema de construção que analisa instruções de construção reproduzíveis especificadas no Nix Expression Language, Uma linguagem puramente funcional com avaliação preguiçosa. Expressões Nix são funções puras. tomando dependências como argumentos e produzindo derivation especificando um ambiente de construção reproduzível para o pacote. O Nix armazena os resultados da construção em endereços exclusivos especificados por um hash da árvore de dependência completa, criando um armazenamento de pacotes imutável (também conhecido como nix store) que permite atualizações atômicas, reversões e instalação simultânea de diferentes versões de um pacote, eliminando essencialmente dependency hell.

Uso

Instalação

NixOS: O Nix está sendo instalado enquanto você instala o NixOS.

If you intend to utilize Nix on a different Linux distribution or a Mac computer, you can perform a standalone installation: The installation section of the Nix manual describes the installation of standalone Nix from binary or source.

Nix commands

The Nix commands are documented in the Nix reference manual: main commands, utilities and experimental commands. Prior to version 2.0 (released in February 2018) there have been different commands.

Configuration

On NixOS, Nix is configured through the nix option.

Standalone Nix is configured through nix.conf (usually found in /etc/nix/), which defines a number of settings relating to evaluation, builds, garbage collection, sandboxing, and user permissions. Details on the available options are found in the Nix reference manual.

Even further configuration is possible with Home Manager to manage declarative environments for a single user. For system-wide configuration on Linux, you can use System Manager. For system-wide configuration on macOS, nix-darwin is the preferred solution.

Internals

Nix store

Packages built by Nix are placed in the read-only Nix store, normally found in /nix/store. Each package is given a unique address specified by a cryptographic hash followed by the package name and version, for example /nix/store/nawl092prjblbhvv16kxxbk6j9gkgcqm-git-2.14.1. These prefixes hash all the inputs to the build process, including the source files, the full dependency tree, compiler flags, etc. This allows Nix to simultaneously install different versions of the same package, and even different builds of the same version, for example variants built with different compilers. When adding, removing or updating a package, nothing is removed from the store; instead, symlinks to these packages are added, removed or changed in profiles.

Profiles

In order to construct a coherent user or system environment, Nix symlinks entries of the Nix store into profiles. These are the front-end by which Nix allows rollbacks: since the store is immutable and previous versions of profiles are kept, reverting to an earlier state is simply a matter of change the symlink to a previous profile. To be more precise, Nix symlinks binaries into entries of the Nix store representing the user environments. These user environments are then symlinked into labeled profiles stored in /nix/var/nix/profiles, which are in turn symlinked to the user's ~/.nix-profile.

Sandboxing

When sandbox builds are enabled, Nix will setup an isolated environment for each build process. It is used to remove further hidden dependencies set by the build environment to improve reproducibility. This includes access to the network during the build outside of fetch* functions and files outside the Nix store. Depending on the operating system access to other resources are blocked as well (ex. inter process communication is isolated on Linux); see nix.conf section in the Nix manual for details.

Sandboxing is enabled by default on Linux, and disabled by default on macOS. In pull requests for Nixpkgs people are asked to test builds with sandboxing enabled (see Tested using sandboxing in the pull request template) because in official Hydra builds sandboxing is also used.

To configure Nix for sandboxing, set sandbox = true in /etc/nix/nix.conf; to configure NixOS for sandboxing set nix.useSandbox = true; in configuration.nix. The nix.useSandbox option is true by default since NixOS 17.09.

Alternative Interpreters

Há um esforço contínuo para reimplementar o Nix, do zero, no Rust.

tvix

Há também uma bifurcação do Nix 2.18 liderada pela comunidade, chamada Lix, focada em correção, usabilidade e crescimento. Embora também tenha portado alguns componentes do Nix para Rust, não é uma reescrita completa como o Tvix.

Lix

Tentativas anteriores podem ser encontradas em github