Setting up a new machine is time-consuming, and becomes complicated when it needs to be done remotely. If you're installing NixOS, the nixos-anywhere tool allows you to pre-configure the whole process including:
- Disk partitioning and formatting
- Configuring and installing NixOS
- Installing additional files and software
You can then initiate an unattended installation with a single CLI command. Since nixos-anywhere can access the new machine using SSH, it's ideal for remote installations.
Once you have initiated the command, there is no need to 'babysit' the installation. It all happens automatically.
You can use the stored configuration to repeat the same installation if you need to.
What it is, why we made it, and how it fits into the Nix ecosystem
Zero to Nix is a highly opinionated learning resource for Nix created by Determinate Systems. We believe Zero to Nix fills a major gap for two reasons:
- We find most of the existing Nix documentation to be difficult to navigate for beginners. Sources like the Nixpkgs manual, the official website, Nix Pills, and semi-official sources like nix.dev are all great once you have a strong sense of how Nix works and what it provides. We encourage you to explore them and we even link them in many places in Zero to Nix. But together they can be daunting to the uninitiated, and we wanted to provide a gentle "front end" to the official documentation sources.
- We strongly believe that flakes are the future of Nix and that people onboarding into Nix should use them from the get-go. But flakes are currently marked as an experimental feature of Nix and are thus not discussed in any of the official Nix documentation sources (with the exception of the Wiki entry for flakes).
This is a ported version of the Nix Pills, a series of blog posts written by Luca Bruno (aka Lethalman) and originally published in 2014 and 2015. It provides a tutorial introduction into the Nix package manager and Nixpkgs package collection, in the form of short chapters called ‘pills’.
Since the Nix Pills are considered a classic introduction to Nix, an effort to port them to the current format was led by Graham Christensen (aka grahamc / gchristensen) and other contributors in 2017.
For an up-to-date version, please visit https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/. An EPUB version is also available.
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Reproducible
Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they
are reproducible and don't have undeclared dependencies, so if a package
works on one machine, it will also work on another. -
Declarative
Nix makes it trivial to share development and build environments for your
projects, regardless of what programming languages and tools you’re
using. -
Reliable
Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package cannot break other
packages. It allows you to roll back to previous versions, and ensures that
no package is in an inconsistent state during an upgrade. -
NixOS Manual - NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix package manager
Wer kennt es nicht: Man startet ein neues Softwareprojekt oder steigt bei der Entwicklung eines bestehenden Projektes mit ein und muss erst mal zahlreiche Compiler, Interpreter, Editoren, Abhängigkeiten und Weiteres installieren. Dabei heißt es nicht selten, man soll davon die Version 1.2.24-50rc4 mit Bugfix-Patch 19 installieren, sonst funktioniert es nicht.