Hi all,
You might have heard my name from Alejandra, the Nix formatter.
I have been contributing to nixpkgs, and I realized something. The GitHub PR view is OK: it has labels and filters. But we were missing a tool built for the culture and language of nixpkgs: r-ryantm updates, maintainers, comitters, the merge bot, Hydra and channels. So I made one:
It is free, it needs no sign-in, and it reads the open update PRs every few minutes. Press “Personalize” at the top, type your GitHub login (it stays in your browser) and tick what fits you. The site then shows what you can do. Here is what it gives each kind of person.
You want to help, and you have a computer that can build
- “Which PR can I review that is simple and cheap to build?” Speed run gives you one PR at a time: CI passed, low risk, 10 rebuilds or fewer, the longest waits first. Tick “I build PRs on my computer” and each PR shows the checkout and nixpkgs-review commands to copy.
- “Which package can I adopt that people use a lot?” Orphans lists the packages with no maintainer or a quiet one. Sort by use (from Homebrew, Debian and Arch popularity data) to find the ones many people use, or by rebuilds (fewest first) to find the ones that are cheap to start with.
- “How do I start?” The first review guide and the first update guide take you through your first review and your first update, step by step.
You maintain packages
- “What waits on me?” Before: a set of saved GitHub searches. Now: your own page (your-login's nixpkgs update queue | nixpkgs-ctl) shows the updates of your packages, your review requests and the PRs blocked on you.
- “Can I merge this with the merge bot?” Before: read the bot’s rules and check them by hand. Now: each PR says yes, or names the rule that fails. Your queue puts first the PRs you can merge now with one comment.
- “Is this update only a version and hash change?” Before: open the diff. Now: each PR shows its risk (major or 0.x bump, rebuild count, changes beyond version and hashes, CI and nixpkgs-review result).
You opened PRs
- “Which of my PRs need me?” Your drafts, and your PRs with a merge conflict or failed CI.
You are a committer, or you have Triage
- “What can only a committer merge?” The approved PRs that the merge bot cannot merge, and the reason.
- “Is there already a PR for this update?” Before: search by package name and compare. Now: Cleanup lists the duplicate and obsolete PRs that can close, with the reason, a close button and the
gh pr closecommand.
For everyone
- “Did this update break the build on Hydra?” Broken after update.
- “Is my merged PR in nixos-unstable yet?” Each merged PR shows which channels it reached, and about how long the next one takes.
- Also Security (security updates that wait), Backports, Authors, Stats, and an Atom feed per person.
Did you know? (from Stats, on 6 Nov 2026)
- 270 update PRs are fully ready: approved, CI passed, and only a committer can merge them. The median one has waited 12 days.
- 207 open PRs are duplicates: 100 packages have more than one open update PR, and usually only one of them needs to stay.
- 739 PRs can merge now: CI passed and the merge bot accepts them. They only need one comment from a maintainer.
- 1,219 passed CI and have no approval yet. The median one has waited 6 days.
- About 3,200 update PRs are open. About 240 open each day, and about 215 merge each day.
- 66 security updates are open.
- After a merge, the median update reaches nixos-unstable-small in 5 hours and nixos-unstable in 24 hours.
The data comes only from public GitHub, Repology and Hydra data. Some history is still filling in, and the site says “not read yet” where it does not know.
If you find a wrong fact, press “Send feedback” at the bottom of any page, or reply here. I will fix it.
Built with love for this community,
Kevin