FAQs

Q: Why not just use docker?

While docker certainly plays in the space of "consistent and isolated environments"; it does not spark a great deal of joy when used for development environments; the essential reason being: rebuilding images is very slow.

While one can do sophisticated things with layered images; in almost every case it will be more complicated and worse than the equivalent Nix setup.

This is not to say that Nix and docker are incompatible; indeed, it is very typical to provide "user-facing" docker images built directly from your Nix project!

Q: Does Nix replace my existing build tools?

No.

The main reason is that your language-specific tools are typically more efficient, and maintain their own caches to allow for incremental building. While some ecosystems are better than others; typically during development you do don't want to be invoking nix build ...-style statements.

The main point is that the nix build produces a consistent output (i.e. distributable executable) across all systems and aligns with the output of local development; without Nix, this simple property is very hard to achieve!

Q: Where can I find out what packages are available?

Here: search.nixos.org

This is the "official" list of community-maintained packages; but part of the beauty of the Nix ecosystem is that it is decentralised; you can install packages from anywhere.