# A Full-Source Bootstrap for NixOS

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-full-source-bootstrap-for-nixos/74801
**Category:** Announcements
**Created:** [January 28, 2026, 5:14pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-full-source-bootstrap-for-nixos/74801 "2026-01-28T17:14:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
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### Author: ![nzbr](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/nzbr/32/6568_2.png) [@nzbr](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/nzbr)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2026, 5:14pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-full-source-bootstrap-for-nixos/74801/1 "2026-01-28T17:14:33Z")

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As part of my bachelor’s thesis, I created a full-source bootstrap chain for NixOS.

It consists of a modified nixpkgs fork that I modified to bootstrap the package set based on the bootstrap chain from [Aux Foundation](https://git.auxolotl.org/auxolotl/foundation).  
Additionally, there is a larger bootstrap chain based on [live-bootstrap](https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap), that builds a full NixOS installation, including the Nix package manager itself from source.

While the project is not in a state that it could or should be merged into nixpkgs as-is, I hope that it may serve as a proof of concept and as a starting point for extending the [minimal-bootstrap](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/os-specific/linux/minimal-bootstrap) package set already present in nixpkgs.

You can find [my thesis](https://nzbr.github.io/nixos-full-source-bootstrap/thesis.pdf) as well as [the code](https://github.com/nzbr/nixos-full-source-bootstrap) on GitHub.

Lastly, a huge thank you to @jakehamilton and @emilytrau for their work on the Aux Foundation bootstrap, without which this would not have been possible!

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