GitPedia

Nix

Nix, the purely functional package manager

From NixOS·Updated June 20, 2026·View on GitHub·

Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the [Nix manual](https://nix.dev/reference/nix-manual) for more details. The project is written primarily in C++, distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 license, first published in 2012. It has gained significant community traction with 17,135 stars and 1,945 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: c-plus-plus, declarative-language, functional-programming, nix, package-manager.

Nix

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Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package
management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the Nix manual
for more details.

Installation and first steps

Visit nix.dev for installation instructions and beginner tutorials.

Full reference documentation can be found in the Nix manual.

Building and developing

Follow instructions in the Nix reference manual to set up a development environment and build Nix from source.

Contributing

Check the contributing guide if you want to get involved with developing Nix.

Additional resources

Nix was created by Eelco Dolstra and developed as the subject of his PhD thesis The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, published 2006.
Today, a world-wide developer community contributes to Nix and the ecosystem that has grown around it.

License

Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from NixOS/nix via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/21/2026