Nix comes with certain defaults about what packages can and cannot be installed, based on a package's metadata. By default, Nix will prevent installation if any of the following criteria are true: The package is thought to be broken, and has had its meta.broken set to true. The package isn't intended to run on the given system, as none of its meta.platforms match the given system. The package's meta.license is set to a license which is considered to be unfree. The package has known security vulnerabilities but has not or can not be updated for some reason, and a list of issues has been entered in to the package's meta.knownVulnerabilities. Note that all this is checked during evaluation already, and the check includes any package that is evaluated. In particular, all build-time dependencies are checked. nix-env -qa will (attempt to) hide any packages that would be refused. Each of these criteria can be altered in the nixpkgs configuration. The nixpkgs configuration for a NixOS system is set in the configuration.nix, as in the following example: { nixpkgs.config = { allowUnfree = true; }; } However, this does not allow unfree software for individual users. Their configurations are managed separately. A user's nixpkgs configuration is stored in a user-specific configuration file located at ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix. For example: { allowUnfree = true; } Note that we are not able to test or build unfree software on Hydra due to policy. Most unfree licenses prohibit us from either executing or distributing the software.

There are two ways to try compiling a package which has been marked as broken. For allowing the build of a broken package once, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_BROKEN=1 For permanently allowing broken packages to be built, you may add allowBroken = true; to your user's configuration file, like this: { allowBroken = true; }

There are also two ways to try compiling a package which has been marked as unsupported for the given system. For allowing the build of an unsupported package once, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNSUPPORTED_SYSTEM=1 For permanently allowing unsupported packages to be built, you may add allowUnsupportedSystem = true; to your user's configuration file, like this: { allowUnsupportedSystem = true; } The difference between a package being unsupported on some system and being broken is admittedly a bit fuzzy. If a program ought to work on a certain platform, but doesn't, the platform should be included in meta.platforms, but marked as broken with e.g. meta.broken = !hostPlatform.isWindows. Of course, this begs the question of what "ought" means exactly. That is left to the package maintainer.

There are several ways to tweak how Nix handles a package which has been marked as unfree. To temporarily allow all unfree packages, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 It is possible to permanently allow individual unfree packages, while still blocking unfree packages by default using the allowUnfreePredicate configuration option in the user configuration file. This option is a function which accepts a package as a parameter, and returns a boolean. The following example configuration accepts a package and always returns false: { allowUnfreePredicate = (pkg: false); } For a more useful example, try the following. This configuration only allows unfree packages named flash player and visual studio code: { allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [ "flashplayer" "vscode" ]; } It is also possible to whitelist and blacklist licenses that are specifically acceptable or not acceptable, using whitelistedLicenses and blacklistedLicenses, respectively. The following example configuration whitelists the licenses amd and wtfpl: { whitelistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ amd wtfpl ]; } The following example configuration blacklists the gpl3 and agpl3 licenses: { blacklistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ agpl3 gpl3 ]; } A complete list of licenses can be found in the file lib/licenses.nix of the nixpkgs tree.

There are several ways to tweak how Nix handles a package which has been marked as insecure. To temporarily allow all insecure packages, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_INSECURE=1 It is possible to permanently allow individual insecure packages, while still blocking other insecure packages by default using the permittedInsecurePackages configuration option in the user configuration file. The following example configuration permits the installation of the hypothetically insecure package hello, version 1.2.3: { permittedInsecurePackages = [ "hello-1.2.3" ]; } It is also possible to create a custom policy around which insecure packages to allow and deny, by overriding the allowInsecurePredicate configuration option. The allowInsecurePredicate option is a function which accepts a package and returns a boolean, much like allowUnfreePredicate. The following configuration example only allows insecure packages with very short names: { allowInsecurePredicate = pkg: builtins.stringLength (lib.getName pkg) <= 5; } Note that permittedInsecurePackages is only checked if allowInsecurePredicate is not specified.

You can define a function called packageOverrides in your local ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix to override Nix packages. It must be a function that takes pkgs as an argument and returns a modified set of packages. { packageOverrides = pkgs: rec { foo = pkgs.foo.override { ... }; }; }

Using packageOverrides, it is possible to manage packages declaratively. This means that we can list all of our desired packages within a declarative Nix expression. For example, to have aspell, bc, ffmpeg, coreutils, gdb, nixUnstable, emscripten, jq, nox, and silver-searcher, we could use the following in ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix: { packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; { myPackages = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "my-packages"; paths = [ aspell bc coreutils gdb ffmpeg nixUnstable emscripten jq nox silver-searcher ]; }; }; } To install it into our environment, you can just run nix-env -iA nixpkgs.myPackages. If you want to load the packages to be built from a working copy of nixpkgs you just run nix-env -f. -iA myPackages. To explore what's been installed, just look through ~/.nix-profile/. You can see that a lot of stuff has been installed. Some of this stuff is useful some of it isn't. Let's tell Nixpkgs to only link the stuff that we want: { packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; { myPackages = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "my-packages"; paths = [ aspell bc coreutils gdb ffmpeg nixUnstable emscripten jq nox silver-searcher ]; pathsToLink = [ "/share" "/bin" ]; }; }; } pathsToLink tells Nixpkgs to only link the paths listed which gets rid of the extra stuff in the profile. /bin and /share are good defaults for a user environment, getting rid of the clutter. If you are running on Nix on MacOS, you may want to add another path as well, /Applications, that makes GUI apps available.

After building that new environment, look through ~/.nix-profile to make sure everything is there that we wanted. Discerning readers will note that some files are missing. Look inside ~/.nix-profile/share/man/man1/ to verify this. There are no man pages for any of the Nix tools! This is because some packages like Nix have multiple outputs for things like documentation (see section 4). Let's make Nix install those as well. { packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; { myPackages = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "my-packages"; paths = [ aspell bc coreutils ffmpeg nixUnstable emscripten jq nox silver-searcher ]; pathsToLink = [ "/share/man" "/share/doc" "/bin" ]; extraOutputsToInstall = [ "man" "doc" ]; }; }; } This provides us with some useful documentation for using our packages. However, if we actually want those manpages to be detected by man, we need to set up our environment. This can also be managed within Nix expressions. { packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; rec { myProfile = writeText "my-profile" '' export PATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/bin:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin export MANPATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/share/man:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/man:/usr/share/man ''; myPackages = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "my-packages"; paths = [ (runCommand "profile" {} '' mkdir -p $out/etc/profile.d cp ${myProfile} $out/etc/profile.d/my-profile.sh '') aspell bc coreutils ffmpeg man nixUnstable emscripten jq nox silver-searcher ]; pathsToLink = [ "/share/man" "/share/doc" "/bin" "/etc" ]; extraOutputsToInstall = [ "man" "doc" ]; }; }; } For this to work fully, you must also have this script sourced when you are logged in. Try adding something like this to your ~/.profile file: #!/bin/sh if [ -d $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d ]; then for i in $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/*.sh; do if [ -r $i ]; then . $i fi done fi Now just run source $HOME/.profile and you can starting loading man pages from your environment.

Configuring GNU info is a little bit trickier than man pages. To work correctly, info needs a database to be generated. This can be done with some small modifications to our environment scripts. { packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; rec { myProfile = writeText "my-profile" '' export PATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/bin:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin export MANPATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/share/man:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/man:/usr/share/man export INFOPATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/share/info:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/info:/usr/share/info ''; myPackages = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "my-packages"; paths = [ (runCommand "profile" {} '' mkdir -p $out/etc/profile.d cp ${myProfile} $out/etc/profile.d/my-profile.sh '') aspell bc coreutils ffmpeg man nixUnstable emscripten jq nox silver-searcher texinfoInteractive ]; pathsToLink = [ "/share/man" "/share/doc" "/share/info" "/bin" "/etc" ]; extraOutputsToInstall = [ "man" "doc" "info" ]; postBuild = '' if [ -x $out/bin/install-info -a -w $out/share/info ]; then shopt -s nullglob for i in $out/share/info/*.info $out/share/info/*.info.gz; do $out/bin/install-info $i $out/share/info/dir done fi ''; }; }; } postBuild tells Nixpkgs to run a command after building the environment. In this case, install-info adds the installed info pages to dir which is GNU info's default root node. Note that texinfoInteractive is added to the environment to give the install-info command.