Nix

ID

nix

Home page

https://nixos.org

Version requirement

>= 2

Platforms

🐧 Linux · 🍎 macOS

Operations

installed · outdated · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · sync · cleanup

purl types

pkg:nix

CLI name

nix-env

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: nix

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/nix.py

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.

What mpm adds to nix

Through mpm, nix gains --exact and --extended search, to narrow to exact names or match descriptions.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover nix alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your nix commands, in mpm

You already know nix: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…

With nix

With mpm

List what’s installed

nix-env --query --installed

mpm --nix installed

List outdated packages

nix-env --query --upgradeable --compare-versions

mpm --nix outdated

Search for a package

nix-env --query --available --attr-path --description 'hello'

mpm --nix search hello

Install a package

nix-env --install hello

mpm install pkg:nix/hello

Upgrade one package

nix-env --upgrade hello

mpm --nix upgrade hello

Upgrade everything

nix-env --upgrade

mpm --nix upgrade --all

Remove a package

nix-env --uninstall hello

mpm remove pkg:nix/hello

Clear caches

nix-collect-garbage --delete-old

mpm --nix cleanup --cache

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

orphans

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

doctor

Selecting and configuring nix

Deselect nix for a single run with --no-nix, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
nix = false

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.nix]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template nix prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes

A few jobs you would otherwise script around nix, one mpm command each:

  • Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --nix dump nix.toml, then mpm restore nix.toml on the next one.

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --nix sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

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

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

  • Registry: Git-manifest indexes

  • Retraction: Index revert: reverting the manifest, Portfile or derivation commit withdraws the version

  • Publish date: ❌ only the commit date, which is client-set and trivially backdated

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.

Version probe

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+)"

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

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --nix installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog

  • 6.3.0 (2026-04-09)

    • Add Nix package manager with installed, outdated, search, install, upgrade, remove, sync, and cleanup support.