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NixOS
nixpkgs
Nix2013–2026
NixOS / nixpkgs

nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
360Distinct people
597Mentions
11Explicit recommenders
26.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Nix Packages collection & NixOS

GitHub

Where it is used

  • NixOS — NixOS uses Nixpkgs as a core part of the distribution; it is built around Nixpkgs. This powers its reproducible, declarative system configuration. Source

What people are saying

I love NixOS, it's my daily driver on my personal laptop, but it definitely has given me more than its fair share of headaches. If everything you're going to do is in Nixpkgs,…

tombert used a recommendation phrase. 11 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.

A technical vision for the Haskell ecosystem direct repository linkDebated

Commenters debate whether Haskell's primary bottleneck is technical performance, such as compile time and incremental builds, or its lack of a coherent, polished ecosystem for building diverse applications like web and desktop software. While some argue that foundational libraries and better developer experience are the missing pieces, others contend that the language's utility is constrained by fragmented tooling and unclear positioning compared to more universal alternatives.

17 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year597 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-12-15 16:18:08 UTC to 2026-10-21 00:27:48 UTC.

02550751001252013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 23 mentions; 1 submissions, 22 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 0 submissions, 22 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 0 submissions, 21 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 31 mentions; 1 submissions, 30 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 59 mentions; 1 submissions, 58 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 112 mentions; 3 submissions, 109 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 72 mentions; 3 submissions, 69 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 81 mentions; 5 submissions, 76 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 77 mentions; 3 submissions, 74 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 53 mentions; 5 submissions, 48 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 25 mentions; 2 submissions, 23 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC23122
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC22022
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21021
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC31130
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC59158
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1123109
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC72369
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC81576
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC77374
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC53548
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC25223

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 140,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution. Manuals NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools Community Discourse Forum Matrix Chat Official wiki Community-maintained list of ways to get in touch (Discord, Telegram, IRC, etc.) Other Project Repositories The sources of all official Nix-related projects are in the NixOS organization on GitHub. Here are some of the main ones: Nix - the purely functional package manager NixOps - the tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community NixOS homepage - the NixOS.org website hydra - our continuous integration system NixOS Branding - NixOS branding Continuous Integration and Distribution Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra. Continuous package builds for unstable/master Continuous package builds for the NixOS 26.05 release Tests for unstable/master Tests for the NixOS 26.05 release Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels. Contributing Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem like a lot at first, it helps to consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity. Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests. For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page. Donations The infrastructure for NixOS and related projects is maintained by a nonprofit organization, the NixOS Foundation. To ensure the continuity and expansion of the NixOS infrastructure, we are looking for donations to our organization. You can donate to the NixOS Foundation through SEPA bank transfers or by using Open Collective: License Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License. NoteMIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

31 sources
patrec·Nov 27, 2019
Here's a concrete example: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio... Maybe the three most noteworthy things are: 1. it's not hard to write your own nix expression 2. you get a reproducible build 3. there are very powerful hooks to allow you to easily customize derivations by various means (look at some more complex derivation, like php, which defines dozens of options and there are other mechanisms as well). 1. Brew also has, but not 2 or 3 (it's definitely more customizable than say debian packages, but much less so than nix)
In Homebrew 2.2
evil-olive·Oct 21, 2019
For the majority of changes, it "just works". For example, here's the part of nixpkgs that configures wireless networking via wpa_supplicant, as well as the actual package build of wpa_supplicant: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-19.09/nixos/modu... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-19.09/pkgs/os-sp... Because they're contained within the same git repo, if a new version of wpa_supplicant changed the syntax of wpa_supplicant.conf, the upgrade could be handled easily (assuming the user-facing options in NixOS didn't need to change). For more complicated changes, there's `system.stateVersion`: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/FAQ/When_do_I_update_stateVersion An example of this would be if NixOS version A ships with Postgres version X by default, while NixOS version B upgrades to Postgres version Y. stateVersion allows a sane upg
Read the rest
rade path where you can update to NixOS version B without breaking your database immediately (because stateVersion is still A).
In Attempting to Use GNU Guix
tazjin·Aug 17, 2019
Currently when running a private Nixery instance you can actually specify a full git commit hash for the Nix repository that you're using. If this repository is the upstream nixpkgs[1], or if your private repository follows the same rules about not importing anything without fully-pinned hashes, you can already get those guarantees about the image content with Nixery today! The one exception is packages that are not in the binary cache, end up rebuilt and aren't reproducible (the binaries might differ) - but NixOS is ~98% reproducible already[2]! [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ [2]: https://r13y.com
In Nixery: Transparently build and serve containers using Nix
mkingston·Aug 12, 2019
NixOS is great. I use it as my daily driver. But. In my experience, your distro will never have all the software you would like in its repos. And I've found this is true of NixOS also. So it should be mentioned that some software does not play nicely with it [0][1]. Because some things will be missing from distro repos, packaging is, to me, quite a valuable skill. Compare, for example, the packages for autorandr for Nix and Arch [2][3]. When I started using Arch I found the Arch package fit much better within my understanding of the world. I expect most here would find the same. Here is what is essentially the manual for Nix packaging [4]. Personally I'd say that if you're unwilling to consume that, eventually you are going to encounter a frustrating problem with Nix that you cannot solve, and potentially regret using it. Though, using a
Read the rest
VM or potentially a container might get you around some/many of those issues. I should also mention that Nix Pills may be worth a read before beginning to use NixOS- it's what convinced me to switch, in fact. [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522822/different-me... [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/36759 [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=autor... [3] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e380ef398761206954e514... [4] https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/
In Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?
cwp·Jul 21, 2019
Yes, I use fetchTarball to get the pinned version of nixpgs. Like this: let nixpkgs = builtins.fetchTarball { name = "nixpkgs-upstream"; url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/a835adc10cb813d214a9069361d94a2a3f8eb3a5.…; sha256 = "0h4lacvqmk356ihc7gnb44dni6m5qza23vlgl6w6jdhr9pjcmdcm"; }; overlay = self: super: { # customizations }; in import nixpkgs { overlays = [ overlay ]; } This isn't even simplified. I just cut out the contents of the overlay. For more on how overlays work take a look at these references; they were really helpful to get me started. https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#chap-overlays https://blog.flyingcircus.io/2017/11/07/nixos-the-dos-and-do...
In Flakes – Proposed mechanism to package Nix expressions into composable entities
Scaevolus·Jun 7, 2019
If I'm understanding this glorious hack correctly, this allows Nix to determine if Chrome has an update available: 1) Nix network access is only allowed for things where you guarantee the hashes of what's output. This is generally used to do things like "download http://example.com/release-1.2.tar.xz, it will have SHA1 93f3025c7802a1a11e4f16186089b583ef1095b8" 2) There are known pairs of strings that have equivalent SHA1 hashes. 3) To determine if a fetch would succeed in a "pure" way, write a network-accessing function that will return a "true" or "false" string with identical hashes, then you can use that (supposedly deterministic) string to return a (nondeterministic!) True or False to the caller. 4) This is used to run a command like `curl -s -L -f -I https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-of... `. If the command s
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ucceeds, we know we can use this version of the browser to update. I don't know how it reads the channel version data without running into the same determinism issues. Here's the latest update to the hack, moving from MD5 to SHA1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/ed8f3b5fa3cebfc3662a...
In Abusing SHA-1 collisions for Chromium updates

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