Nix

Nix, the functional package manager.

Note

All operations use the imperative nix-env interface, which manages a per-user package profile. Declarative approaches (NixOS modules, home-manager) are not covered.

Channel refresh (sync) and store garbage collection (cleanup) shell out to the sibling nix-channel and nix-collect-garbage binaries installed alongside nix-env, not to nix-env itself.

Platforms

  • 🐧 Linux

  • 🍎 macOS

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

Ecosystem

  • Accepted purl types: pkg:nix

Usage

$ mpm --nix installed
$ mpm --nix search "query"
$ mpm --nix upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:nix/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --nix upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-nix, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: nix-env

The version is probed by running:

$ nix-env --version
nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1

and extracted with:

r"nix-env \(Nix\) (?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Nix’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ❌ None

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Nix well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ nix-env --query --installed
hello-2.12.1
nix-2.18.1
python3-3.11.6

$ nix-env --query --upgradeable --compare-versions
hello-2.12.1 < 2.13.0
python3-3.11.6 < 3.12.0