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.
The ecosystem's core components are:
| Component | Description | Usecases |
| Nix Package Manager | A package manager that parses the Nix Expression Language to specify reproducible build processes. Nix stores the results into hashed addresses, allowing multiple versions of the same package to live side by side. | • Package management in Linux & Darwin • Reproducible building of applications & containers in production • |
| 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. | • Fully declarative & reproducible Linux system configuration management • |
| Nixpkgs | The largest community maintained Nix package and NixOS module repository; standard releases of NixOS are hosted here. | • Finding & Sharing Nix Packages & NixOS Modules with the Community • |
| 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. | • Deploying NixOS configurations to bare-metal, virtual machines and containers • |
| Hydra | A Nix based continuous build system. | • Hosting a build farm for continuous integration scenarios • |
In addition there are many other applications developed by the Nix community, utilizing and supporting these core technologies.
