If you are using Linux or Mac OS X, the easiest way to install Nix is to run the following command: $ bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install) This will perform a single-user installation of Nix, meaning that /nix is owned by the invoking user. You should run this under your usual user account, not as root. The script will invoke sudo to create /nix if it doesn’t already exist. If you don’t have sudo, you should manually create /nix first as root, e.g.: $ mkdir /nix $ chown alice /nix You can also manually download and install a binary package. Binary packages of the latest stable release are available for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS X and various other systems from the Nix homepage. You can also get builds of the latest development release from our continuous build system. For Fedora, RPM packages are available. These can be installed or upgraded using rpm -U. For example, $ rpm -U nix-1.8-1.i386.rpm For Debian and Ubuntu, you can download a Deb package and install it like this: $ dpkg -i nix_1.8-1_amd64.deb For other platforms, including Mac OS X and other Linux distributions, you can download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies. (This is what the install script at https://nixos.org/nix/install uses.) You should unpack it somewhere (e.g. in /tmp), and then run the script named install inside the binary tarball: alice$ cd /tmp alice$ tar xfj nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2 alice$ cd nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin alice$ ./install Nix can be uninstalled using rpm -e nix or dpkg -r nix on RPM- and Dpkg-based systems, respectively. After this you should manually remove the Nix store and other auxiliary data, if desired: $ rm -rf /nix