📓 literature/20200629132641-so_tell_me_about_nix.md by @ryan ☆

So, tell me about Nix

Notes

Nix is:
- A package manager
- A programming language
- An operating system (NixOS, a Linux distro)

Nix can be used like brew or apt

  # this will install curl
  nix-env -iA curl

One thing that’s unique about Nix (the package manager) is that you can create ad-hoc development environments

  # this spawns a new shell with curl installed
  # once this shell is exited, it will no longer be available
  nix-shell -p curl

nix-shell allows for the creation of isolated development environments
NixOS, unlike other Linux distros, allows a user to specify their configuration using the Nix package manager
- For example, if I wanted to create a user whose default shell was zsh, I could do this via a configuration. The rest of my system’s configuration would live here too
- This also allows for rollbacks to any previous configuration
- Nix, being a [[functional programming]] language, basically describes system configuration like state = nextState(currentState)