Welcome to this instance of Nixery. It provides ad-hoc container images that contain packages from the Nix package manager. Images with arbitrary packages can be requested via the image name.

Nix not only provides the packages to include in the images, but also builds the images themselves by using a special layering strategy that optimises for cache efficiency.

For general information on why using Nix makes sense for container images, check out this blog post.

Simply pull an image from this registry, separating each package you want included by a slash:

docker pull nixery.dev/shell/git/htop

This gives you an image with git , htop and an interactively configured shell. You could run it like this:

docker run -ti nixery.dev/shell/git/htop bash

Each path segment corresponds either to a key in the Nix package set, or a meta-package that automatically expands to several other packages.

Meta-packages must be the first path component if they are used. Currently the only meta-package is shell , which provides a bash -shell with interactive configuration and standard tools like coreutils .

Tip: When pulling from a private Nixery instance, replace nixery.dev in the above examples with your registry address.

If you have a question that is not answered here, feel free to file an issue on Github so that we can get it included in this section. The volume of questions is quite low, thus by definition your question is already frequently asked.

Over on Github. It is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Consult the documentation entries in the sidebar for information on how to set up your own instance of Nixery.

The instance at nixery.dev tracks a recent NixOS channel, currently NixOS 20.03. The channel is updated several times a day.

Private registries might be configured to track a different channel (such as nixos-unstable ) or even track a git repository with custom packages.

While we appreciate the enthusiasm, if you would like to use Nixery in your production project we recommend setting up a private instance. The public Nixery at nixery.dev is run on a best-effort basis and we make no guarantees about availability.

No. Nixery is not officially supported by Google.

Nixery was written by tazjin, but many people have contributed to Nix over time, maybe you could become one of them?