First an article about what’s NixOS trying to achieve and NixOS if you want to know what is all about.
Today I started getting my hands dirty with Nixpkgs packages, the package collection of NixOS.
I had used NixOS as my primary OS only for three days now, and I found some packages needed an upgrade because I had recent versions in my other OS.
In my case geary needed to be bumped to version 0.10.0, this was a nice first approach to Nixpkgs for me.
To install the package from the Nixpkgs It’s necessary to add the route to the repository clone, in my case.
nix-env -i geary -f ~/code/nixos/nixpkgs/default.nix
This will install geary in my system with the version in that repository, in this case 0.10.0.
I’ve been using the new version (0.6.1) of SpiderOak for a while, I needed It too and I made an upgrade. I have some problems with directories, but following the NixOS manual made the debugging easier.
To install SpiderOak I had to enable the allow unfree variable.
export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1
nix-env -i spideroak -f ~/code/nixos/nixpkgs/default.nix
Finally I wanted to get the phpcs (PHP Code Standard tool) working for my emacs php-mode, It wasn’t in the package manager, so I read the php packages and some configuration similar to what I wanted to achieve, et volia!.
To try them you could use my Nixpkgs repository.
I only scratched the surface of package management in Nix today, but there will be more as soon as I need more from It. :-)
Reference: Create and debug NixOS packages.