1.1 Welcome: is this Nix training for you?

You have run into Nix, followed a few tutorials, and watched the whole thing fall apart the moment you needed something the tutorial did not cover. This free opening video makes the case that Nix is worth the investment, then shows exactly how this course gets you there: what it teaches, in which order, what you can do at the end, and what you need on your machine to follow along.

In this video

• Why tutorial-first learning breaks the first time you change something, and the order we teach in instead: the commands, then the language, then the sandbox, then packaging
• The route through the course: builtins.derivation the quick way, then mkDerivation with its phases and hooks, then project structure, then overrides and overlays
• Why flakes come last, the conversation with people from the NixOS Foundation behind that order, and the customers who stopped using flakes for certain projects
• What you can do afterwards: a dev shell that falls out of your package definition for free, pinned dependencies that still build in ten years, patch sets you can vouch for, cross compilation and static linking
• What you need to follow along: a Linux or macOS machine or a VM, root rights, and internet. WSL usually works. Plus the one environment to avoid, because it leaves you with only the bad parts of Nix.

After this lesson

You know what the course covers, in which order, and whether your machine and your calendar fit it. The 14 hours are split into lessons of five to 20 minutes, so a lesson fits into a coffee break, and lifetime access means you can watch them in any order and come back to them later.

Links:

• https://repology.org/repositories/graphs
• https://ossinsight.io/analyze/NixOS/nixpkgs