NixOS definition ¶

Definition ¶

NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution that aims to improve the state of the art in system configuration management.

In existing distributions, actions such as upgrades are dangerous: upgrading a package can cause other packages to break, upgrading an entire system is much less reliable than reinstalling from scratch, you can’t safely test what the results of a configuration change will be, you cannot easily undo changes to the system, and so on.

We want to change that….

Declarative ¶

NixOS has a completely declarative approach to configuration management you write a specification of the desired configuration of your system in NixOS’s modular language, and NixOS takes care of making it happen.

Reliable ¶

NixOS has atomic upgrades and rollbacks. It’s always safe to try an upgrade or configuration change: if things go wrong, you can always roll back to the previous configuration.

DevOps-friendly ¶

Declarative specs and safe upgrades make NixOS a great system for DevOps use.

NixOps, the NixOS cloud deployment tool, allows you to provision and manage networks of NixOS machines in environments like Amazon EC2 and VirtualBox.