Nix Pills

by Bruno Luca

This is a ported version of the Nix Pills, a series of blog posts written by Luca Bruno (aka Lethalman) and orginally published in 2014 and 2015. It provides a tutorial introduction into the Nix package manager and Nixpkgs package collection, in the form of short chapters called 'pills'.

Since the Nix Pills are considered a classic introduction to Nix, an effort to port them to the current format was led by Graham Christensen (aka grahamc / gchristensen) and other contributors in 2017.

265 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jethro Kuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series really helped me demystify some of the magic happening in the Nix language, and some of the design choices. for example, serialising a derivation (attribute set) results in its path to the nix store, which is incredibly convenient for writing packages.

[Ryan Weisenburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great look into the EARLY inner workings of Nix. It is mostly about nix dev env to compile programs. Helpful and common patterns. Insightful information about various paths and their purposes. I will have to read again after learning more of Nix.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of several blog posts that explain the general idea of nix and demonstrate how to actually package something. Although it gave a good impression, it is mainly geared towards people who want to create packages and not a general introduction into the differences of nixOS to a normal linux distribution.

It is well and entertaining written and if you keep in mind you are reading a blog series really worth the time.

[Ignacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good to get a quick intro to Nix.

[Tae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nix low-level details. You will learn a lot if you are already familiar with Nix expressions, but please don't recommend this to beginners.