Welcome to my Nix training material repository!
I created this material for the purpose of having a set of slides, code snippets, example projects, and advanced visualisations to teach the Nix expression language and ecosystem to developers of varying backgrounds.
(Note that this material was really designed with a teacher in mind. As such, some slides are very sparse and not self-explanatory. I’m working on expanding speaker notes to make the course material easier to read on your own.)
Is your company looking for on-site or remote training? Contact me for details and booking!
This course is meant to be taught in 5 half-day sessions. It ranges from beginner subjects all the way to advanced usage of the module system, cross-compilation, and other special niches.
- Day 1: Introduction
- A short introduction and elevator-pitch of what Nix(OS) can do for you. This course covers some theoretical background on how Nix does what it does, priming you to think like Nix, and some exercises to get practise in writing Nix code.
- Day 2: Builders
- Get started writing Nix packages with so called stand-alone builders. This course covers some of the packaging details, such as understanding dependencies and overriding build mechanisms.
- Day 3: Nixpkgs
- This course is an introduction into nixpkgs, a gigantic repository set of over 80,000 packages. Nixpkgs allows you to re-use packaging code other users have contributed. As part of this course we cover using nixpkgs tools, as well as how to contribute things you have made back into nixpkgs.
- Day 4: Cross-compilation
- In this course we cover cross-compilation with Nix. This includes theoretical background on what cross-compilation is, some Nix-specific concepts, and practical examples for packaging embedded (Rust) code, as well as fixing existing cross-compilation errors.
- Day 5: Module system
- Nix is a powerful configuration language. If you run NixOS on your system, you may have already used modules! This course demystifies their functionality and provides a set of examples on how to build your own module abstractions.
The slides are written in org-mode, a plain-text markup language. As such it is very easy to read and adapt in any text editor. GitHub and GitLab are able to render the documents, but not as slide decks.
A hosted version of this course is available at learn.spacekookie.de!
If you want to build the slides yourself, you will need org-mode and
org-reveal installed. You can find a utility function for
generating the output in ci/export-course.el. (Load the function with
M-x eval-buffer)
This course has been sponsored by various companies that have paid for training and the creation of new material in the past.
(todo: insert logos)
This material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) or later.
This license allows you to include the material in your own work, as long as that work is also shared under the same license (CC-BY-SA 4.0 or later). Importantly your work must attribute any original authors of work that you have used.
This text is not legal advice! Check with a lawyer in your respective jurisdiction what your rights and obligations under this license are.