Nix Community

This article provides an overview of the Nix Community, to give an idea of who we - the users and maintainers of the Nix Ecosystem - are. To find the various ways to reach us, see the get in touch.

People

Nix Ecosystem users and contributors are a mixed bunch, ranging from hobbyist to professional, from industry to academia. Typical user groups include:

• desktop users using Nix and NixOS to make life on their personal machines easier;
• power users duplicating their environment across their personal and work machines;
• developers using Nix to reproducibly build their software, and to manage various development environments;
• system administrators declaratively configuring servers and clusters with NixOS and NixOps;
• researchers interested in making the computation in their research reproducible.

Institutions

NixOS Foundation

The NixOS Foundation is the official steward of the Nix Ecosystem, appointing the leadership of the community maintained Nixpkgs collection - which hosts all Nix packages and NixOS modules - as well as NixOps and Hydra. It also funds the official Hydra instance which builds the Nixpkgs collection.

Consultants

There are a several qualified consultants that can provide support for Nix-based systems:

• Determinate Systems
• Enlambda
• Mayflower
• nixcloud
• NumTide
• Obsidian Systems
• Serokell
• Tweag I/O

Industry

Many companies utilize Nix-based systems for various purposes. Prominent examples include:

• Mozilla (see also nixpkgs-mozilla)
• Tumblr
• LogicBlox
• LumiGuide
• RhodeCode
• Awake Security
• Atlassian
• Magnetic Insight, a medical imaging company.

Academia

Nix has its roots in academia; Nix was the result of Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis in the University of Utrecht, and Hydra was developed at the Technical University of Delft. Some academic research continues to develop the Nix Ecosystem further - notably some work is planned on incremental builds by Guillaume Maudoux as part of his PhD.

Nix is also being extensively used to manage powerful computing clusters, since its resolution of dependency problems allows letting users install packages ad-hoc with greatly reduced risk of breaking things. Academic clusters utilizing Nix-based software include some of the biggest clusters in the world:

• Human Brain Project
• Blue Brain Project

Contribute

Development of Nix and NixOS happens primarily on Nixpkgs. You can contribute by helping reporting, diagnosing and closing issues, by creating, testing and reviewing pull-requests, and by becoming a maintainer of packages and modules hosted on the repository. For more information, see the contributing section of the Nixpkgs article.

Development of the wiki and other community initiatives happens at at the nix-community Github repository. The #nixos-wiki channel on Matrix is available for questions.

There is also a Maillinglist where you can submit patches if you prefer to submit patches via email. These will then be forwarded to Nixpkgs as a pull request by someone on the ML.