I Think It's Time to Give Nix a Chance

The modern developer tooling ecosystem has exploded with choices, leading to frustrating scenarios where some piece of code builds perfectly on someone’s system, runs flawlessly in production, but mysteriously fails to build for you and you have absolutely no idea why. You’re left debugging with no clear direction—perhaps it’s a missing system dependency, a subtly different library version, or some environment variable that exists somewhere in the void, and nowhere else.

If this sounds familiar, you too might be experiencing the fundamental problem that Nix was designed to solve: the lack of true reproducibility in software development.

Despite being around for about two decades, Nix has largely flown under the radar of mainstream development. Most developers have heard of it in passing—often described as “that functional package manager with a steep learning curve” or “the thing NixOS uses”—dismissing it as academic or overly complex. I believe this perception is getting increasingly outdated, Nix deserves a chance.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Nix still does have a steep learning curve. It requires learning a new functional programming language, understanding unfamiliar concepts like derivations and the /nix/store, and rethinking how package management works. The documentation can be dense, scattered, and the error messages are outright unhelpful in some cases. You’re essentially learning an entirely different approach to software deployment and environment management.

But here’s the thing—as of this post, the tooling around Nix has matured significantly, and the problems Nix solves have only become more pressing. If you’ve ever lost hours debugging environment differences, juggled multiple version managers, or struggled with reproducible builds, Nix addresses these pain points at the architectural level rather than through workarounds.

And I am here to argue that despite the quirks and learning investment, Nix’s benefits are compelling enough to warrant your time. The question isn’t whether Nix, as a tool and a language, is complex—it is. The question is whether the problems it solves are worth learning something genuinely different. In this post, you can expect a brief introduction to what Nix, the tool, can do for you and how it may be worth giving a try right now.

Why Traditional Package Management Breaks Down

Most package managers work by installing software into shared system locations. Install a specific version of Python, and it goes straight into /usr/bin/python. Need a different version of Python for another project? You either overwrite the first installation or create complex alternatives systems that are painful to manage.

This shared-state approach creates inevitable conflicts:

Your frontend application needs the latest version of NodeJS, but a legacy service requires an older one.
Your applications depend on conflicting versions of OpenSSL libraries.
Teams use different operating systems with slightly different utilities. Heck, even same versions of tools, like sed, are functionally different across Linux and MacOS.

In such cases, one may say that version managers help with language runtimes. But what about system libraries, databases, or compiled tools? You end up juggling multiple such tools, each with different commands and behaviors.

Orchestration and containerized solutions like Docker and Kubernetes help, but they introduce their own complexities and performance downgrades. More importantly, Docker containers themselves aren’t reproducible—running apt-get update or pip install requests at different times can yield different results, even with the same Dockerfile. And frankly, no one really needs Kubernetes, they just have it because everyone and their grandma has it. I digress, that’s a topic for another day.

This is where Nix comes in.

…And How Nix Solves the Problem

Nix makes no assumptions about the global state of your system and takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of installing packages into shared locations where they can conflict, everything goes into the immutable /nix/store, with each package getting a unique directory based on a cryptographic hash of its build inputs.

/nix/store/2v66xkgfmdipzpwgl813n4mqgck6w3fd-nodejs-22.14.0/
/nix/store/2znhzcp5ran8q5mzyqgz6lxi3a56rgva-nodejs-20.18.1/
/nix/store/4rk85a5rsladhcc3ffpnx2kwglvs0i-nodejs-18.17.0/

These hashes are computed using SHA-256 over the package’s complete build dependency graph—source code, compiler version, build flags, dependencies, even the build script itself. Change any input, and you get a different hash, which means a completely separate package in the store.

Cryptographic Guarantees and Safety

Technically, you might state that hash collisions are possible with any cryptographic hash function, and you won’t be wrong here. However, the probability of a SHA-256 collision is approximately one in 2¹²⁸—or roughly one in 340 undecillion!. For perspective, this is far less likely than being struck by lightning while simultaneously winning the lottery multiple times.

More importantly, Nix implements robust failsafe mechanisms. It uses NAR (Nix Archive) hashes, a deterministic format that canonicalizes source trees by normalizing timestamps, file permissions, and directory ordering. Unlike traditional TAR archives which include non-deterministic metadata, NAR hashes ensure identical content always produces identical hashes. Nix validates packages using both the NAR hash and additional metadata like Git revision hashes, providing multiple layers of integrity verification. This has prevented an issue in the past, where GitHub changed the hash format of their archives, causing systems and services depending on these hashes to fail. Hash Collision - Flox

This isolation means multiple versions coexist without conflicts. Your React app gets Node.js 18, the legacy API keeps Node.js 16, and they exist in completely separate filesystem namespaces.

Now, I’m in no way trying to proliferate a 15^th competing standard here that solves all package management woes for you and your grandma. Nix is far more capable at things than just that, and I’ll tell you why.

Reproducible Environments with Flakes

Modern Nix organizes projects using “flakes” Nix flakes - Zero to Nix —standardized specifications that pin every dependency with cryptographic precision. Think of them as package.json or Cargo.toml, but with mathematical guarantees that every single build will result in the same derivation, no matter when, where, or how you build it.

While flakes have been “experimental” for quite a long time now, it has truly pushed Nix one step closer to complete reproducibility and shared development environments. For clarity, Experimental does not mean unstable, as flakes have practically been “stable” since 2021, despite the experimental tag. Here’s what a simple flake might look like:

# This is a nix flake environment running
# Python 3.11, with pandas and numpy installed.
# The environment can be accessed by running:
#    $ nix develop

{
  description = "Example Python Data Analysis Environment";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: {
    devShells.x86_64-linux.default =
      nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.mkShell {
        buildInputs = with nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux; [
          python311
          python311Packages.pandas
          python311Packages.numpy
        ];
      };
  };
}

Let’s take this as an example. When you share this flake (along with the flake.lock) with someone and they build it, they get exactly—not approximately—the same environment as when you created the flake. The automatically generated flake.lock The flake.lock file - Zero to Nix file contains cryptographic hashes for every dependency in the transitive closure. This means that building this same flake over and over again, even a few years down the line, will ideally still result in the exact same environment. Well, at least until the source of the software disappears from the face of the earth, and the Nix binary cache contracts bit-rot.

Also, these Nix flakes are backed by git and only include tracked files in builds, ensuring forgotten local files and hash changes cause immediate build failures rather than silent inconsistencies.

Running Packages Without Installing

Usually to run a package on any system you would need to install it, or use an AppImage, Flatpak, snap, you name it. But not with Nix. One of Nix’s most practical features is temporary tool access without system pollution:

# Run Node.js 20 without installing it
nix run nixpkgs#nodejs_20 -- --version

# Get a temporary shell with multiple tools
nix shell nixpkgs#{imagemagick,ffmpeg}

# Try software from any Git repository with flakes
nix shell github:DeterminateSystems/fh -- fh --help

This eliminates tool accumulation while providing instant access to any software in the Nix ecosystem. When you exit the shell, the tools disappear from your environment (but stay in the /nix/store until it’s garbage collected).

True Package Isolation

Traditional package managers create a shared global namespace where conflicts are inevitable. Nix solves this architecturally by storing each package in /nix/store/ with cryptographically unique paths. Multiple versions of the same package coexist without interference because they occupy completely separate filesystem locations.

$ ls /nix/store | rg nodejs-.\[0\-9.\]+drv

/nix/store/2v66xkgfmdipzpwgl813n4mqgck6w3fd-nodejs-22.14.0.drv
/nix/store/2znhzcp5ran8q5mzyqgz6lxi3a56rgva-nodejs-20.18.1.drv
/nix/store/4rk85a5rsladhcc3ffpyfnx2kwglvs0i-nodejs-20.19.2.drv

This isolation extends beyond simple version conflicts. Each package includes its complete dependency tree in isolation, meaning you can run applications with entirely different versions of fundamental libraries like glibc simultaneously. The Nix store’s immutable design ensures that once built, packages never change, eliminating an entire class of “it worked yesterday” problems.

Simply put, each project can use a different Node.js version, present on the system, without conflicts. The hash 2v66xkgfmdipzpwgl813n4mqgck6w3fd in this case encodes not just Node.js 22.14.0, but the exact glibc version, compiler flags, and every dependency used to build it. This can be confirmed by running a simple nix-store --query on both derivations:

$ nix-store --query --tree 2v66xkgfmdipzpwgl813n4mqgck6w3fd-nodejs-22.14.0.drv

/nix/store/2v66xkgfmdipzpwgl813n4mqgck6w3fd-nodejs-22.14.0.drv
├───/nix/store/shkw4qm9qcw5sc5n1k5jznc83ny02r39-default-builder.sh
├───/nix/store/vj1c3wf9c11a0qs6p3ymfvrnsdgsdcbq-source-stdenv.sh
├───/nix/store/cfp8jh04f3jfdcjskw2p64ri3w6njndm-bash-5.2p37.drv
│   ├───/nix/store/3jmwf7n7mdjk99lbwmznwkjvd5kwxlp4-glibc-2.40-66.drv [...]
...

$ nix-store --query --tree 2znhzcp5ran8q5mzyqgz6lxi3a56rgva-nodejs-20.18.1.drv

/nix/store/2znhzcp5ran8q5mzyqgz6lxi3a56rgva-nodejs-20.18.1.drv
├───/nix/store/v6x3cs394jgqfbi0a42pam708flxaphh-default-builder.sh
├───/nix/store/s63zivn27i8qv5cqiy8r5hf48r323qwa-bash-5.2p37.drv
│   ├───/nix/store/qhdvi3qcn60vrapyhsxxpbw0q63gmfz8-glibc-2.40-36.drv [...]
...

Package directory names correspond to cryptographic hashes that take into account all dependencies, build flags, and even compiler versions. This content-addressable storage means identical inputs always produce identical outputs, making builds truly reproducible across different machines and time periods.

Development Environment Excellence

Beyond core benefits, Nix’s ecosystem provides sophisticated tooling for seamless workflows. With nix-direnv nix-direnv - GitHub , an extension to direnv, Nix flake environments activate automatically when changing directories:

# .envrc file
use flake

Now cding into the directory automatically loads the Nix environment. The cross-platform consistency is particularly valuable—the same flake.nix that works on Linux works identically on macOS through nix-darwin, and WSL, eliminating platform-specific tooling differences.

And if you still don’t want to interact with or write Nix files directly, there’s tools like Flox, Devshell, Devbox, built on top of Nix that abstract the pain away.

Security on Nix

Nix’s unique architecture provides security benefits that extend beyond reproducibility. The immutable nature of the Nix store and its departure from standard Linux filesystem conventions create inherent security advantages.

Immutable Package Store

Once built, packages in /nix/store cannot be modified. This prevents entire classes of attacks where malware modifies system binaries or libraries. Traditional package managers allow in-place updates that can be exploited, but Nix’s atomic model makes such attacks impossible.

Package Sandboxing and Anti-Tampering

By design, anyone is free to contribute packages to the central Nix package repository. Although all packages there, not marked as nonfree, are built from source, where the source is downloaded before the build process, verified by hash, and only then processed.

By philosophy, Nix prevents uploading pre-built packages to nixpkgs and requires additional reviews before merging, thus ensuring an additional layer of safety at the expense of the latest package updates being a bit delayed—usually only by a couple of days. All built packages, on the official build infrastructure or locally, are sandboxed by default. None of the packages have internet access inside the build environment, meaning that all the dependencies must be resolved before the build runs.

Also, all packages are required to contain a hash of dependencies, ensuring that the build fails if the source or any dependencies are tampered with or poisoned.

In contrast, traditional package management systems rely heavily on trust. As an example, the AUR is a repository of community-contributed Arch packages where you’re trusting random maintainers. Anyone can upload a PKGBUILD that could download and execute arbitrary code during installation. While you can inspect the build script, many users install with yay -S package without review. Similarly, the Fedora RPM repositories which have pre-built binaries signed by maintainers, where you have to trust that the binary matches the claimed source code and the build environment wasn’t compromised.

Non-Standard Filesystem Layout

Nix deliberately breaks from the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). There’s no /usr/bin filled with system binaries, no /lib or /usr/lib containing shared libraries. This means malware designed for traditional Linux systems often fails because it cannot locate expected system components at standard paths.

Dynamic Linking Protection

Ad-hoc binaries downloaded from the internet cannot run on NixOS without explicit configuration. Traditional Linux systems allow dynamically linked binaries to access system libraries through standard paths like /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2. On NixOS, these paths either don’t exist or point to controlled implementations. This prevents many categories of malicious binaries from executing.

Controlled Binary Execution

Although not impossible, to run external binaries, you need tools like nix-ld nix-ld - GitHub which provides controlled access to a compatibility layer. This forced deliberation makes it much harder for malicious software to execute unnoticed.

While this isn’t “security through obscurity” (the design is well-documented), it does mean that common attack vectors simply don’t work in a Nix environment, providing defense-in-depth against malware targeting traditional Linux systems.

Performance and Caching

Nix provides performance advantages through sophisticated caching and deduplication. When each package is built, it is stored with its content-addressable path, meaning identical dependencies are built once and shared across all projects.

Binary caching eliminates most compilation time. Popular packages are pre-built and cached, so you typically download binaries rather than compiling from source. There are also services like Cachix, attic that can host binary cache for you so you can push and cache the lesser known, or even your own Nix packages after building them once.

With cache, the first environment activation might take up to a few minutes to download dependencies, but subsequent activations are near-instantaneous. However, environment load times can be a trade-off. Directory changes that trigger environment loading through nix-direnv can take a few seconds depending on dependencies, as Nix maintains separate instances for each tool. But in most cases, everything will be seamless.

When Nix Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)

After reading this far, you might be wondering if Nix is right for your situation. But what I talked about in this post is barely scratching the surface of what Nix is capable of.

Nix provides the most value when:

Environment drift is costly: Financial services, healthcare, or any domain where debugging production issues has high stakes
Onboarding takes days: Complex stacks with multiple databases, language runtimes, and system dependencies that require extensive setup documentation
Cross-platform development: Teams mixing Linux, macOS, and WSL with different package managers and library versions
Compliance requirements: Industries requiring reproducible builds for audit trails or regulatory compliance
Research and experimentation: Academic computing, data science, or ML research where reproducing exact environments is critical
Legacy system maintenance: Managing multiple versions of the same software for different clients or product versions

Nix might be overkill if:

You’re working on simple projects with minimal, standard dependencies
Your team already has smooth onboarding and deployment processes
Time-to-market pressure outweighs technical debt concerns
Your stack consists of well-containerized microservices with stable dependencies
Learning new tools would significantly slow current development velocity
You’re working solo on personal projects without collaboration needs

The Honest Drawbacks

I have been using Nix for about 8 years now. And while I would say that Nix is an indispensible part of my life at this point, I still do have some gripes with it and the occasional hurdles while explaining some concepts and philosophies to people. I still learn new things about it everyday, and yet feel like I know very little when it comes to Nix. Here’s what I think the main drawbacks are, simplified:

Learning Investment

The functional programming concepts and new mental models take significant time to internalize. You’ll feel less productive initially. Finding documentation or help for some issue you have might be difficult, but not impossible. Expect at least a few weeks before you become comfortable with the basic concepts. I can personally say it’s worth the effort and pain, but in the end it depends on what you want to achieve with Nix.

Debugging Difficulty

When things go wrong, error messages often reference store paths and internal Nix mechanics rather than familiar concepts. Troubleshooting requires understanding Nix’s execution model, which adds complexity to already difficult debugging scenarios.

Ecosystem Integration

Some software expects traditional Linux filesystem layouts. Proprietary tools that hardcode paths to /usr/bin or /lib require workarounds. Although Nix does have built-in utilities that help with this during the build process.

The way you look at and interact with packages and services in the system also completely changes once you adopt the “Nix way”.

Documentation Gaps

While improving, Nix documentation can be scattered. Error messages, though better than before, can still be outright unhelpful in some cases.

Storage Requirements

The Nix store grows large over time, requiring periodic garbage collection to remove unused packages. Although this can be solved by enabling the periodic garbage collector on NixOS or by running it manually.

How Do I Get Started?

If you’re interested in trying Nix, I would suggest:

Install with flakes enabled: Use the Determinate Systems Installer for quick setup
Start with temporary tools: Use nix shell or nix run to try software without installing. A list of all the official packages can be found here
Create a simple development environment: Use nix flake init in a project directory and try writing a flake for it
Add automatic activation: Uninstall some tools you depend on after setting up developer environment with flakes and set up nix-direnv to load environments automatically. Or use any of the other tools that abstract Nix for you
Join the community: The NixOS Discourse is huge and welcoming to newcomers, and so is the Nixpkgs repository

And as for the documentation or general readings on Nix:

Nix Pills - Explains what Nix is in brief
NixOS & Flakes Book - A good starting point to understand more about Nix Flakes
nix.dev - Official Nix Documentation
NixOS Wiki - Wiki for Nix and NixOS-related stuff
Noogle - Google, but for Nix functions
NixOS Search - Search packages in the official nixpkgs repository
Zero to Nix - A general guide for Nix and Flakes

There’s also NixOS, if you would like to spend more time learning and understanding Nix better.

Why It’s Worth Considering

The software development landscape has grown increasingly complex. We manage more dependencies, support more platforms, and deploy to more diverse environments than ever before. Traditional package management approaches that worked for simpler systems are showing their limitations.

Nix offers a different path—one where environment reproducibility isn’t hoped for but guaranteed, where dependency conflicts are impossible by design, and where trying new tools doesn’t risk breaking existing setups.

The learning investment is significant, but for teams struggling with environment management, the payoff comes through reduced debugging time, faster onboarding, and more reliable deployments.

The best tool isn’t always the most popular one—sometimes it’s the one that actually solves your problems.

P.S.: This website runs on my homelab running NixOS.