Introduction to Nix

Welcome to the world of Nix! This guide aims to take you from a complete beginner to confidently using Nix for reproducible development environments and even managing your entire operating system with NixOS.

Nix is a powerful package manager that brings functional programming principles to system configuration. This means your builds are reproducible, changes are atomic, and rollbacks are easy. Forget "it works on my machine" – with Nix, it works everywhere.

We'll start with the fundamentals of the Nix language, then explore how Nix builds software. From there, we'll dive into the massive Nixpkgs collection, cover how Nix ensures reproducibility with flakes, and finally, show you how to manage your entire system with NixOS.

Let's begin!