![]() ![]() Just declare what you depend on, and this won’t change the outside environment or anything else. You don’t have to know where they are or install them globally because that could be annoying for other things. Nix somewhat has this same idea, but at the package manager level, in that, rather than saying, well, I want to apt-get install this thing and apt-get install this thing…Nix takes the declarative approach of saying, in a file, that this project depends on this package and this package, and we are gonna make them available for you somewhere. You describe your dependencies, and then you build that…and it’s nice it’s declarative. If you take Make, the grandfather of all build systems, Make has this nice interface where you just describe everything that you want to be built. I tend to describe it as a build system that pretends to be a package manager or the other way around. Théophane Hufschmitt, a developer at Tweag and a contributor to Nix, focused on Nix’s ability to work as a build system ![]() I started all my interviews by asking the users to define Nix in their own words. From these discussions I learned that, though Nix can refer to many different technologies, there’s a central idea that’s at the core of everything. I spoke with a wide range of Nix users, from consultants, to hobbyists, to devs using Nix in production, and even a Nix contributor. I wanted to hear from experienced Nix users to learn more about what Nix is and what value it delivers. I’ve played around with Nix, and it is very cool, but I’m an engineer turned writer at heart, and it’s been a while since I last used build tools day-in-day-out for production work. You may have come across some similar confusion when trying to understand what exactly Nix is. I pulled out my phone and looked it up, “Says here it’s a programming language for managing and building software?” “I thought it was a Linux distro, but like, different?” “It’s a package manager, but like, different,” they said. I was at a bar with friends, and one of them mentioned that they’d heard that Nix is turning 20 this month. Earthly provides consistent build environments that enhance complement reproducibility. This article examines Nix package management. ![]()
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