niv VS flake-utils

Compare niv vs flake-utils and see what are their differences.

niv

Easy dependency management for Nix projects (by nmattia)

flake-utils

Pure Nix flake utility functions [maintainer=@zimbatm] (by numtide)
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niv flake-utils
16 8
1,437 986
- 8.0%
6.3 5.8
21 days ago 18 days ago
Haskell Nix
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

niv

Posts with mentions or reviews of niv. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-07.
  • NixOS + Haskell best practices circa March 2023
    6 projects | /r/haskell | 7 Mar 2023
    niv
  • What are the biggest Pain Points with NIX? And what makes it worth the pain?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 17 Aug 2022
    Essentially you can just think of it as a standardized default.nix/shell.nix with built-in Niv integration.
  • Our Roadmap for Nix
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2022
    I agree that the FP part is not the only issue. It's that the community feels a bit more academic/I'll fix this for myself in the way that works best for me.

    You can indeed achieve some reproducibility with Docker. It's tricky though, as you'd have to pin exact package versions of software. If you'd `FROM ubuntu:$VERION`, and would run an `apt-get update`, you're not guaranteed to get the same software.

    Nix is like ZFS, as that it breaks the wall between two previously distinct area's. Those being building software, and installing/configuration software on your OS. It's quite different from the snapshot-everything methodology that Docker uses. Yeah, one can split in multi-stage images etc, but than you'll be keeping track of which dependencies need to be moved between the stages yourself, in a manner that cannot be abstracted away, so you're doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over again.

    People also state that LVM + ext3 is more than sufficient compared to the complexity of ZFS. They miss out on the fact on how much more fine grained solutions are possible with ZFS.

    I've used niv [0] before flakes arrived, and am actually still using that instead of flakes. The experimental nature of them has scared me away from them, as I'm not daily involved in this ecosystem at the moment.

    [0] https://github.com/nmattia/niv#niv

  • Simplest way to set up neovim
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 26 Jun 2022
    You can use something like Niv to manage additional sources. I use it to fetch some Emacs packages, for example ligature.el. Then you update the package using $ niv update.
  • Unstable vs Stable channels
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Jun 2022
    One thing that made this easier was switching from using Nix channels to explicitly pinning my dependencies with Niv. I honestly never fully understood how channels worked, and it's just much nicer to have everything specified in my Git repo. The exact commit of Nixpkgs that I'm using is in my sources.json file, so "reverting" just means checking out an older commit of my configs from Git then running nixos-rebuild switch. If I were redoing my dotfiles today I'd probably use Nix Flakes rather than Niv, but I suspect that Niv is still an easier option to get started with.
  • How to downgrade single package?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 31 Jan 2022
    Pin nixpkgs, and version control it. If you're using flakes, then just version control the flake.lock alongside your configuration. If you're not using flakes, you can use niv to easily pin nipxkgs, at the expense of some boiler plate.
  • Compiling emacs is killing me
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Oct 2021
  • Ditch Your Version Manager
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2021
    This... This is laughable. How do I install ruby 2.6.8? Oh, there's no ruby_2_6_8, because of course there isn't. And this could be difference between a secure system and all your base are belong to us.

    And they call this reproducible builds?

    And that's before getting into the ridiculous

    --- start quote ---

    All the software that we installed depends on the specific version of the nixpkgs channel that we installed on our system [whose only version is a commit hash in a git repo]

    --- end quote ---

    So you need an extra tool [2] for, quote, "painless dependencies for Nix projects."

    Yes, sure. I'm definitely ditching my version managers in favor of this tool, that hasn't solved these issues in 18 years of its existence.

    [1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=21.05&from=0&size=...

    [2] https://github.com/nmattia/niv

  • Fearless tinkering
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 May 2021
    Here is link number 1 - Previous text "b'niv'"
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 May 2021
    What is the upside of using Flakes instead of niv?

flake-utils

Posts with mentions or reviews of flake-utils. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-29.
  • Nix Flakes
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 29 Dec 2022
  • Our Roadmap for Nix
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2022
    The ‘flake-utils’ readme is a pretty good jumping off point: https://github.com/numtide/flake-utils

    I have this or that nitpick with FL and FLP but overall it’s very solid stuff. FLP is a little more “magical”, and that’s not always the best starting out, but you really can’t go wrong with either.

  • Rust Environment and Docker Build with Nix Flakes
    6 projects | dev.to | 18 May 2022
    We added two inputs, the first is nixpkgs which lets us specify which version of nixpkgs we should use. There are many thousands of packages in the nixpkg repository, and they are updated often so here will use the unstable branch. We also added flake-utils which helps us generalize the flake to support multiple systems, not just Linux.
  • Getting Started Using Nix Flakes As An Elixir Development Environment
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 Jan 2022
    The inputs is how you can import external sources of other flakes into the flake project you have. In other words, any project you may need or tools required to get started, this is where you will define their source. Example below is using the standard nixpkgs and a tool called flake-utils, which provides a set of functions to make flake nix packages simpler to set up without external dependencies.
  • Workspace Management With Nix Flakes: Jupyter Notebook Example
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2021
    A Nix Flake is just an object - check out those surrounding curly braces. This object has two keys, inputs and outputs. The inputs are where we define the flake's dependencies and where to find all the tools we use. This one has two, nixpkgs and flake-utils. Each of these just points to a GitHub URL, and if you follow those links, you'll see each repo provides its own flake.nix. The outputs of each remote flake get piped into the inputs of my flake, so we can use what they provide.
  • How to transition from shell.nix to flake.nix?
    4 projects | /r/NixOS | 28 Oct 2021
    You can easily transition your shell.nix (and default.nix) to a flake-based one by using flake-utils and flake-compat. The former is actually unnecessary, but I would recommend it for typical project environments. Unless you have an impure dependency, this transition would be easy.
  • Is there a way to use flakes to nix run emacsgcc?
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 31 May 2021
    Flakes can provide different types of things: - some flakes provide applications that you can nix run, - some flakes provide functions that you can import (e.g. https://github.com/numtide/flake-utils), - some flakes provide overlays to use with nixpkgs (e.g. that emacs-overlay you posted).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing niv and flake-utils you can also consider the following projects:

emacs-overlay - Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis]

flake-utils-plus - Use Nix flakes without any fluff.

nix-direnv - A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10]

leksah - Haskell IDE

update-nix-fetchgit - A program to automatically update fetchgit values in Nix expressions

solana-nix - The Solana CLI tools packaged up with Nix

ghcid - Very low feature GHCi based IDE

nixos - A fully automated replicable nixos configuration set

elm-make

nixpkgs - Nix Packages collection & NixOS

hpc-threshold - Small utility for validating whether HPC result is above defined thresholds

nixery - Container registry which transparently builds images using the Nix package manager. Canonical repository is https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot/-/tree/tools/nixery