Nix ecosystem

From NixOS Wiki
Revision as of 12:52, 25 November 2017 by imported>HLandau (Added diagram)

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. The ecosystem's core components are:

File:Nixos-stack.png
  • Nix Package Manager: which uses a purely functional packaging language called 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.
  • Nix Expression Language: a dynamic, functional and lazy DSL for specifying reproducible builds; it draws on features of Haskell, Perl and JSON.
  • 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.
  • Nixpkgs: the largest community maintained Nix package repository.
  • NixOps: a Nix based deployment and provisioning tool, which has support for AWS, Hetzner, GCE and some other cloud providers out of box
  • Hydra: a Nix based continuous build system.
  • many other applications developed by the Nix community, utilizing and supporting these core technologies.