Nix is a package manager drawing inspiration from functional programming. It treats packages like values built by pure functions (i.e. no side-effects: packages never change after they have been built). There can be multiple versions or variants of a package installed at the same time. Nix runs on Linux, macOS and other Unix systems. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks.
Nix stores packages in the Nix store, by default /nix/store with each package having its own unique subdirectory e.g. /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/ where b6gvzjy...d73z is a unique identifier for this package that captures all its dependencies (a cryptographic hash of the package’s build dependency graph). As a result, Nix provides additional reliability: different versions of a package have different paths in the Nix store, any dependencies between them are eliminated. Moreover, upgrading or uninstalling packages cannot break applications depending on it. Nix will never pollute your /usr or /usr/local: removing Nix is a matter to deleting that /nix directory.
Nix has multi-user support, i.e. non-privileged users can securely install any package. Each user have a profile which corresponds to a subset of packages in the Nix store that appear in that user’s PATH. A package installed by several users at the same time will be downloaded only once.
Packages are built from Nix expressions: they describe all dependencies that go into a package build action, i.e. other packages, sources, the build script, environment variables for the build script, etc. Nix tries to ensure that those expressions are deterministic i.e. building a Nix expression twice yields the same result.
Nix can automatically skip building from source and instead use a binary cache, i.e. a server that provides pre-built binaries.
nixpkgs is the default source of packages for the nix package manager; it's available on GitHub
- List all the installed packages:
nix-env -q - Find a package:
nix-env -qa somepackage