All issues of “This month in Nix documentation”
News
The past two months has seen some notable efforts that kept the world of Nix documentation spinning:
@willbush triaged the entire issue backlog on nix.dev and helped close many outdated entries. Thank you very much! This was enormously helpful to keep track of what’s going on, and also prompted me to go through these things again and get an overview.
@rhendric started a great endeavor of expanding the Nix language reference, and added decicated pages on
This is a big improvement in clarity and discoverability of information about the Nix langauge, and what many have been waiting for for a long time. Thank you very much for your patience with my reviews, @rhendric. This is awesome new material!
@tfc of Nixcademy wrote three new tutorials for nix.dev, following the call for a technical writer to support the effort on reducing load on the public binary cache:
This was made possible thanks to many people’s support on Open Collective. The successful crowdfunding campaign in 2023 already helped laying the groundwork to design a curriculum – called the Nix Learning Journey – where these new tutorials now nicely fit into.
I really like the result: Finally, what should be a matter of course when using Nix is accessible to beginners who want to scale their setup. I wish I had that back when I started out.
Tell us what you think!
Get in touch
Check the Nix documentation team page for information on how to get in touch.
How you can help
If you like what we’re doing, consider joining the documentation team or donating to the NixOS Foundation’s documentation project on Open Collective to fund ongoing maintenance and development of learning materials and other documentation.
Recent changes
This is a list of all recent changes made to documentation in the Nix ecosystem.
NixOS/nix
- #11381 Fix few duplicate word occurrences (@jhrcek)
- #11371 Fix diskutil deleteVolume command in Uninstall guide (@secobarbital)
- #11350 Add changelog for homeless-shelter-to-proc (@noamraph)
- #11344 Release note for nix flake show change (@kjeremy)
- #11341 Fix doc build (@edolstra)
- #11335 Update documentation to refer to Meson not Make in most places (@Ericson2314)
- #11324 Remove duplicated section (@SuperSandro2000)
- #11322 doc: Manage expectations for eval-cache (@roberth)
- #11307 fix link from the readme (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #11305 Document function application operator (@roberth)
- #11296 doc/manual: fix misaligned icons in custom.css (@bryango)
-
#11288 add cross-references to
nix-path
overriding (@fricklerhandwerk) - #11280 CONTRIBUTING.md: Add attribution and context rules (@roberth)
- #11279 Urge contributors to read the contributing page + link to matrix (@roberth)
- #11254 docs: installable remove alternate expression flag (@a-kenji)
- #11233 docs: add language/string-literals.md (@rhendric)
- #11231 2.24 release notes (@edolstra)
- #11202 doc/command-ref/nix-shell: Shebangs can occur anywhere (@MostAwesomeDude)
- #11188 Ban integer overflow in the Nix language (@lf-)
- #11186 Fix reference to experimental features docs (@cole-h)
-
#11178 Move
NIX_BIN_DIR
and all logic using it to the Nix executable itself (@Ericson2314) - #11174 docs: add identifiers (@fricklerhandwerk)
NixOS/nixpkgs
-
#333262 nixpkgs-manual: Document
runCommandWith
, refactorrunCommand{,CC,Local}
(@nbraud) - #337984 doc/release-notes: change “New Services” to “New Modules” (@jian-lin)
- #337900 Doc: Move “This is equivalent to” into example block (@matthiasbeyer)
- #337854 nixos/doc/rl-2411: Don’t mention nemo layer-shell change (@bobby285271)
- #337083 doc: remove mention of key type (@zimward)
- #336061 nixpkgs-manual: fix build (@philiptaron)
- #335200 rl-2411.section.md: fix typo from #225051 (@ShamrockLee)
NixOS/nix.dev
- #1041 update NixOS VM tutorial (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1040 Add tutorial on setting up a binary cache (@tfc)
- #1039 update style guide (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1038 Add tutorial about remote provisioning with nixos-anywhere (@tfc)
- #1037 restructure NixOS tutorials TOC (@tfc)
- #1035 make building the manuals optional (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1034 fix broken link (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1033 update Nix and Nixpkgs releases (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1031 Update packaging-existing-software.md (@toraritte)
- #1029 Update towards-reproducibility-pinning-nixpkgs.md (@toraritte)
- #1028 Update declarative-shell.md (@toraritte)
-
#1027 Clarify wording around
nix-shell --run
(@toraritte) - #1025 Add first build information in section of working with local files (@YSawc)
- #1024 Update packaging-existing-software.md (@olga-mcbfe)
- #1023 Update Nixpkgs versions in “declarative shells” tutorial (@olga-mcbfe)
-
#1020 fix mkShellNoCC to use
packages
instead ofbuildInputs
(@willbush) - #1019 fix outdated redirect (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1018 fix search link (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1017 fix missing changes from niv to npins (@fricklerhandwerk)
- #1004 JSON convert in modules error (@jd1t25)
Accepted RFCs
-
#146 [RFC 0146] Meta.Categories, not Filesystem Directory Trees (@AndersonTorres)
While not strictly related to documentation, the migration of package categories metadata to Nix expressions will greatly ease building infrastructure to improve discoverability, a primary concern of the documentation effort.