Nix is a powerful and end-user-empowering software deployment tool and package manager, now available on eRI. It is an alternative to Conda.

Nix Flakes

Nix Flakes provide a reproduceable mechanism for capturing project dependencies. They are an alternative to Conda environments.

Nis Flakes are to be preferred over Nix channels, for reasons of reproducibility. That is, prefer to use nix develop with a flake, rather than nix-shell . The flake.lock file locks to a specific git commit exactly which dependencies have been installed.

Nix Home Manager

Nix Home Manager is a tool for a user to manage their own environment (dotfiles, applications, environment) outside of any per-project environment.

Tips

1. The first time you activate your Home Manager environment (e.g. home-manager switch -v --flake path:$HOME/vc/env/home.nix#agr-eri), you may get an error Could not find suitable profile directory, which seems to be a first-use problem that can be fixed by running nix profile list and retrying the home-manager switch command.