NixOS, Part 1: The Nix Ecosystem
Date and Time
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Location
Online at Jitsi
Presenters
Zachary Liebl - zachliebl zachliebl com
Summary
An overview of the Nix ecosystem. Details of the OS at the January 2025 meeting.
Abstract
Zachary begins with an overview of the Nix ecosystem of tools for making software deployments more reproducible, including Nixlang, a domain-specific-language that all other Nix tools are configured in; Nix-Shell, an ephemeral shell for a reproducible development environment; Disko, a tool for declaratively describing disk partitions and filesystem; Home-Manager, a tool to declaratively configure a user's home directory; and Nixpkgs, one of the largest, most up-to-date software repositories in the world.
He then shows an example of how he used Nixpkgs to replace the use of traditional package managers in an install script in a real-world software project. This expanded the amount of distros supported while simultaneously reducing maintainer overhead.
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