Nox

Nox is a small tool that makes the use of the Nix package manager easier.

Nox is written in Python 3 and requires nix 1.8 and git. It is released under MIT license.

Try it

You can install it from nixpkgs by running nix-env -i nox.

To try the last version, just clone the repository, run nix-build, and run the resulting binaries in result/bin. To install it, run nix-env -if ..

Search

Just run nox QUERY to search for a nix package. The underlying nix-env invocation is cached to make the search faster than your usual nix-env -qa | grep QUERY.

Once you have the results, type the numbers of the packages to install.

Bonus: if you enter the letter 's' at the beginning of the package numbers list, a nix-shell will be started with those packages instead.

Review

The nox-review command helps you find what has changed in nixpkgs, and build changed packages, so you're sure they are not broken. There are 3 modes:

• nox-review revs CURRENT_REV REFERENCE_REV finds the differences between two nixpkgs revisions, and builds those packages as they are in CURRENT_REV.
• nox-review wip compares the nixpkgs in the current working dir against a commit, so you can check that your changes break nothing. Defaults to comparing to HEAD (the last commit), but you can change it: nox-review wip --against master^'.
• nox-review pr PR finds the packages touched by the given PR and build them.

Experimental

I'm working on a new command, nox-update, that will display information about what is about to be updated, especially giving info not provided by nixos-rebuild:

• Why is everything being installed?
• Which are package upgrades?
• Which are expression changes?
• Which are only rebuilds trigerred by dependency changes?
• Especially, what package triggered the rebuild?

A picture is better than a thousand words, so here is what it looks like for now: