<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
version="5.0"
xml:id="ch-about-nix">
<title>About Nix</title>
<para>Nix is a <emphasis>purely functional package manager</emphasis>.
This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional
programming languages such as Haskell — they are built by functions
that don’t have side-effects, and they never change after they have
been built. Nix stores packages in the <emphasis>Nix
store</emphasis>, usually the directory
<filename>/nix/store</filename>, where each package has its own unique
subdirectory such as
<programlisting>
/nix/store/nlc4z5y1hm8w9s8vm6m1f5hy962xjmp5-firefox-12.0
</programlisting>
where <literal>nlc4z5…</literal> is a unique identifier for the
package that captures all its dependencies (it’s a cryptographic hash
of the package’s build dependency graph). This enables many powerful
features.</para>
<simplesect><title>Multiple versions</title>
<para>You can have multiple versions or variants of a package
installed at the same time. This is especially important when
different applications have dependencies on different versions of the
same package — it prevents the “DLL hell”. Because of the hashing
scheme, different versions of a package end up in different paths in
the Nix store, so they don’t interfere with each other.</para>
<para>An important consequence is that operations like upgrading or
uninstalling an application cannot break other applications, since
these operations never “destructively” update or delete files that are
used by other packages.</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Complete dependencies</title>
<para>Nix helps you make sure that package dependency specifications
are complete. In general, when you’re making a package for a package
management system like RPM, you have to specify for each package what
its dependencies are, but there are no guarantees that this
specification is complete. If you forget a dependency, then the
package will build and work correctly on <emphasis>your</emphasis>
machine if you have the dependency installed, but not on the end
user's machine if it's not there.</para>
<para>Since Nix on the other hand doesn’t install packages in “global”
locations like <filename>/usr/bin</filename> but in package-specific
directories, the risk of incomplete dependencies is greatly reduced.
This is because tools such as compilers don’t search in per-packages
directories such as
<filename>/nix/store/5lbfaxb722zp…-openssl-0.9.8d/include</filename>,
so if a package builds correctly on your system, this is because you
specified the dependency explicitly.</para>
<para>Runtime dependencies are found by scanning binaries for the hash
parts of Nix store paths (such as <literal>r8vvq9kq…</literal>). This
sounds risky, but it works extremely well.</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Multi-user support</title>
<para>Nix has multi-user support. This means that non-privileged
users can securely install software. Each user can have a different
<emphasis>profile</emphasis>, a set of packages in the Nix store that
appear in the user’s <envar>PATH</envar>. If a user installs a
package that another user has already installed previously, the
package won’t be built or downloaded a second time. At the same time,
it is not possible for one user to inject a Trojan horse into a
package that might be used by another user.</para>
<!--
<para>More details can be found in Section 3 of our <a
href="docs/papers.html#securesharing">ASE 2005 paper</a>.</para>
-->
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Atomic upgrades and rollbacks</title>
<para>Since package management operations never overwrite packages in
the Nix store but just add new versions in different paths, they are
<emphasis>atomic</emphasis>. So during a package upgrade, there is no
time window in which the package has some files from the old version
and some files from the new version — which would be bad because a
program might well crash if it’s started during that period.</para>
<para>And since package aren’t overwritten, the old versions are still
there after an upgrade. This means that you can <emphasis>roll
back</emphasis> to the old version:</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env --upgrade <replaceable>some-packages</replaceable>
$ nix-env --rollback
</screen>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Garbage collection</title>
<para>When you uninstall a package like this…
<screen>
$ nix-env --uninstall firefox
</screen>
the package isn’t deleted from the system right away (after all, you
might want to do a rollback, or it might be in the profiles of other
users). Instead, unused packages can be deleted safely by running the
<emphasis>garbage collector</emphasis>:
<screen>
$ nix-collect-garbage
</screen>
This deletes all packages that aren’t in use by any user profile or by
a currently running program.</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Functional package language</title>
<para>Packages are built from <emphasis>Nix expressions</emphasis>,
which is a simple functional language. A Nix expression describes
everything that goes into a package build action (a “derivation”):
other packages, sources, the build script, environment variables for
the build script, etc. Nix tries very hard to ensure that Nix
expressions are <emphasis>deterministic</emphasis>: building a Nix
expression twice should yield the same result.</para>
<para>Because it’s a functional language, it’s easy to support
building variants of a package: turn the Nix expression into a
function and call it any number of times with the appropriate
arguments. Due to the hashing scheme, variants don’t conflict with
each other in the Nix store.</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Transparent source/binary deployment</title>
<para>Nix expressions generally describe how to build a package from
source, so an installation action like
<screen>
$ nix-env --install firefox
</screen>
<emphasis>could</emphasis> cause quite a bit of build activity, as not
only Firefox but also all its dependencies (all the way up to the C
library and the compiler) would have to built, at least if they are
not already in the Nix store. This is a <emphasis>source deployment
model</emphasis>. For most users, building from source is not very
pleasant as it takes far too long. However, Nix can automatically
skip building from source and download a pre-built binary instead if
it knows about it. <emphasis>Nix channels</emphasis> provide Nix
expressions along with pre-built binaries.</para>
<!--
<para>source deployment model (like <a
href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a>) and a binary model (like
RPM)</para>
-->
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Binary patching</title>
<para>In addition to downloading binaries automatically if they’re
available, Nix can download binary deltas that patch an existing
package in the Nix store into a new version. This speeds up
upgrades.</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Nix Packages collection</title>
<para>We provide a large set of Nix expressions containing hundreds of
existing Unix packages, the <emphasis>Nix Packages
collection</emphasis> (Nixpkgs).</para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Service deployment</title>
<para>Nix can be used not only for rolling out packages, but also
complete <emphasis>configurations</emphasis> of services. This is
done by treating all the static bits of a service (such as software
packages, configuration files, control scripts, static web pages,
etc.) as “packages” that can be built by Nix expressions. As a
result, all the features above apply to services as well: for
instance, you can roll back a web server configuration if a
configuration change turns out to be undesirable, you can easily have
multiple instances of a service (e.g., a test and production server),
and because the whole service is built in a purely functional way from
a Nix expression, it is repeatable so you can easily reproduce the
service on another machine.</para>
<!--
<para>You can read more about this in our <a
href="docs/papers.html#servicecm">SCM-12 paper</a>.</para>
-->
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>Portability</title>
<para>Nix should run on most Unix systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and
Mac OS X.<!-- It is also supported on Windows using Cygwin.--></para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect><title>NixOS</title>
<para>NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix. It uses Nix not
just for package management but also to manage the system
configuration (e.g., to build configuration files in
<filename>/etc</filename>). This means, among other things, that it’s
possible to easily roll back the entire configuration of the system to
an earlier state. Also, users can install software without root
privileges. For more information and downloads, see the <link
xlink:href="http://nixos.org/">NixOS homepage</link>.</para>
</simplesect>
<!-- other features:
- build farms
- reproducibility (Nix expressions allows whole configuration to be rebuilt)
-->
</chapter>
