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.

Open source software

Core Components of the Nix Ecosystem:

Component	Manual	Description	Use
Nix	Nix Manual	A package manager that parses Nix expressions specifying reproducible build, putting the result in a store address with a hash of the dependency tree, sidestepping dependency hell and supporting multiversion installs and rollbacks.	Reproducible builds & package management in Linux & Darwin
NixOS	NixOS Manual	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.	Declaratively configure desktops, servers & clusters
Nixpkgs	Nixpkgs Manual	The largest community maintained Nix package and NixOS module repository; standard releases of NixOS are hosted here.	Share Nix packages & NixOS modules
NixOps	NixOps Manual	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.	Deploy & provision NixOS systems, VMs & containers
Hydra	Hydra Manual	A Nix based continuous build system.	CI build farms

In addition there are many other applications developed by the Nix community, utilizing and supporting these core technologies.

Services

• Cachix: binary caches as a service. Free for public caches, subscription for private token-protected caches
• Hercules CI: simplify your CI setup with stateless build agents. Free for open source, per-user subscription for private repositories.
• nixbuild.net (private beta): remote Nix builders as a service. Pay-per-use.