The tools you will hear about.

Manages dotfiles, user packages and per-program settings with the same module system NixOS uses. Works on NixOS, other Linux distributions and macOS.

A front end for rebuilding NixOS or Home Manager and for garbage collection. It shows what will change before switching.

A prebuilt database for nix-index, so nix-locate can tell you which package ships a file without indexing Nixpkgs on your own machine.

Loads a project’s Nix shell when you enter its directory, and caches the result so the environment is not re-evaluated every time.

Pipe a build through nom and you get a tree of what is building, downloading and waiting, with timings, in place of a wall of log lines.

NixOS modules for specific laptops, boards and peripherals: firmware, kernel options and known quirks, collected per device.

Declares partitions, filesystems, LUKS and RAID layouts in Nix and can apply them during installation.

For systems whose root filesystem is wiped at boot. You list the files and directories that should persist; everything else goes.

Decrypts secrets managed with sops (age, GPG or cloud KMS) during activation, so the encrypted files can live in your configuration repository.

Encrypts secrets with age to each machine’s SSH host key and decrypts them on that machine. Smaller in scope than sops-nix.

Applies one colour scheme, wallpaper and set of fonts across many applications through NixOS and Home Manager modules.

Configures Neovim, its plugins and language servers through Nix modules instead of Lua files.

Writes flake outputs with the module system, so per-system boilerplate becomes options you set once.

Declares every formatter a repository uses in one place and exposes them as nix fmt and a flake check.

Formerly pre-commit-hooks.nix. Declares git hooks in Nix, installs them in the development shell and can run the same hooks in CI.

Project environments in a devenv.nix file: languages, services such as PostgreSQL, and long-running processes, built on Nix.

A language server that evaluates Nix code to offer completion and option documentation, including NixOS and Home Manager options.

Search for Nix functions in builtins and lib, with their type signatures and documentation.

Installs NixOS over SSH onto a machine running another Linux, using kexec and disko to partition the disks.

Deploys NixOS systems and other Nix profiles over SSH. If the new generation cuts off the connection, it rolls back.

Deploys a fleet of NixOS machines from one description, building and pushing to hosts in parallel. Moved from zhaofengli/colmena.

A self-hosted binary cache server with S3-compatible storage, multiple tenants and deduplication. Its own README describes it as an early prototype.

The continuous integration system that builds Nixpkgs and NixOS channels. You can also run your own instance.