NixOS

services-flake provides declarative, composable, and reproducible services for Nix development environment, and is based on flake-parts. Enabling users to have NixOS-like service on macOS and Linux.

nixpkgs (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) is a monorepo containing a collection of Nix packages. It also includes various utility Nix functions (like writeShellApplication), as well as the NixOS Linux distribution (including the Module System).

nix-darwin brings NixOS like configuration to macOS, allowing you to install packages (among doing other things) purely through Nix.

If you’ve ever used NixOS before, you might be familiar with the way services are managed. Let’s take a quick look at an example to understand if that will help us arrive at a solution for our problem.

In the last section, we saw how easy it is to run services in NixOS. We are looking for something similar for our development environment that runs across platforms. Additionally, the solution should:

Running services in NixOS is a breeze. For example, running a PostgreSQL Database is as simple as adding one line to your configuration:

Choose from one of the following to install NixOS:

[!tip] Welcome to NixOS Asia NixOS Asia is a community^1 of Nix and NixOS users, promulgated initially from the Indian subcontinent. Talk to us on Zulip!

The Linux distro NixOS comes with Nix pre-installed. You can Install Nix manually on other platforms.

NixOS makes use of the module system to provide various functionality including services and programs. See https://search.nixos.org/options for a list of all available options.

In this second tutorial, we will walk you through the process of installing NixOS. Unlike the first installation tutorial, we will use the command line to install NixOS manually, except for using disko to specify disk partitions declaratively in Nix itself. This is the first step toward our next tutorial, where we will automate the entire installation process.

The above downloaded Nix file uses a hardcoded disk device. So, we need to replace it with the device name of the disk we want to install NixOS on. We can use lsblk to find it.

This tutorial will walk you through the steps necessary to install NixOS, enable flakes while tracking the resulting system configuration in a Git repository.

[!info] Welcome to the tutorial series on NixOS This page is the first in a planned series of tutorials aimed towards onboarding Linux/macOS users into comfortably using NixOS as their primary operating system.

[!info] Linux If you prefer to use Linux, you may be interested in installing NixOS. The following instructions are for users of other Linux distros as well as macOS.