Notes on Nix
Over the weekend I switched my MacOS setup in large part from homebrew to Nix. You can find the new home at github.com/matoous/nix-hoome. To be frank, I know little about Nix which is famous for its steep learning curve so I ended up copying and stitching together code from google and people I follow.
Nix allows multiple different versions of the same binary to be installed at the same time which helps with avoiding collisions and allows different tools to be updated independently.One can do something similar with homebrew, e.g. installing Qt version five using: brew install qt@5, but to my understanding this is way more limiting because of the dependency chain.
- To go over historical versions of specific package see nix-versions.
- Install the package using
nix-env -iA, e.g.nix-env -iA nodejs_20 -f https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/9957cd48326fe8dbd52fdc50dd2502307f188b0d.tar.gz
Previously, nix used multiple different command for different things. E.g. nix-env for installing packages into the environment, nix-shell to init a nix shell, etc. Nowadays, all these commands are available under the nix command which you need to enable using ~/.config/nix/nix.conf:
experimental-features = nix-command flakes
There are a few promising things about Nix that I want to explore:
- With nix it is easy to provision developer environment per-repository. One can do so by adding a flake that configures all required tools for development.
- There’s NixOS which allow whole OS to be declaratively configured using Nix.
- You can build packages using Nix which builds them in isolations using specific versions of dependencies which ensures that you will get a consistent result.
That’s it for now, I will keep on toying around with Nix and see what more there is to it. For now, I manage my dot files and tools using home-manager and started experimenting with using Nix to cross-compile software for Solo.