nix VS nickel

Compare nix vs nickel and see what are their differences.

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nix nickel
366 45
10,621 2,087
7.1% 5.4%
10.0 9.5
1 day ago 10 days ago
C++ Rust
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only 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.

nix

Posts with mentions or reviews of nix. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Tools for Linux Distro Hoppers
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.
  • Go + Hypermedia - A Learning Journey (Part 1)
    6 projects | dev.to | 23 Feb 2024
    1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity
  • What it was like working for Gitlab
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2024
    Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category.

    How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install.

    If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history.

    [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

  • Cloudflare R2-Backed Nix Binary Cache on Fly.io
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    See https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/838 for making content-addressed derivations supported by hydra.nixos.org. At that point, we can actually try out the XP feature at scale.

    Also see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8919 for this accepted RFC

    Once those things are done, we can get back to merging in the IPFS code.

    Now that there is an Nix team and I am on it, there is much, much less of an issue of these experiments being caught in limbo :).

  • The one thing I do not like about the Nix package manager (and a fix for it)
    3 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2024
    The nix package manager is an awesome package manager for linux and macos, which focuses on declarative packages. This means that you can dump out all the packages you want into a file, and nix will go out and fetch them for you.
  • NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
  • Beginners Intro to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).
  • Practical Guide to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:
  • How I use Nix in my Elm projects
    8 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    Nix is a tool that allows you to make reproducible development environments. I've started using it in all my Elm side projects and I've had a good experience with it thus far. To pique your curiosity I just wanted to share my simple setup that has been working quite well for me.
  • Shopware Changes since the 6.0 Dev Training Videos
    5 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2023
    The latter one is based on nix OS using Symfony flex recipes and PHP packagist composer. The flex devenv should work cross-platform on Linux, Windows, and Mac. "The main difference to other tools like Docker or a VM is that it neither uses containerization nor virtualization techniques. Instead, the services run natively on your machine."

nickel

Posts with mentions or reviews of nickel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-01.
  • 10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
    23 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    Nickel:Nickel is a straightforward configuration language aimed at automatically generating static configuration files. Essentially, it's akin to JSON with the addition of functions and types.
  • Show HN: Togomak – declarative pipeline orchestrator based on HCL and Terraform
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    Also look at nickel which is an evolution of nix. It's my favorite in this space.

    nickel-lang.org

    https://github.com/tweag/nickel

  • Show HN: Flake schemas – teaching Nix about your flake outputs
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Aug 2023
  • What config format do you prefer?
    11 projects | /r/rust | 4 Jul 2023
    https://github.com/tweag/nickel could try this
    11 projects | /r/rust | 4 Jul 2023
    I'll also add another candidate if lua isn't the right path (I still think it is): Nickel.
    11 projects | /r/rust | 4 Jul 2023
    Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel
  • Announcing Nickel 1.0, a configuration language written in (and usable from) Rust
    11 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2023
    As for 'providence', I suppose you meant provenance :) it's been delayed because this was less critical for 1.0 to decide on or to implement (as it: it doesn't break backward compatibility in any way to add this feature in the short term), but this is very much on the roadmap: Issue #235. That's a must-have in a language with merging like Nickel.
    11 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2023
    Nickel isn't the first such project. Similar languages already existed: Jsonnet, CUE, Dhall, and Nix to some extent (albeit specialized). Our starting point was in part adding typing to Nix, and we found that the aforementioned language didn't satisfy our design constraints (you can take a look at the RATIONALE.md document for more details).
    11 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2023
    One target-use case of Nickel is to be used as an alternative front-end for Nix (instead of Nix expressions). There is a draft RFC and a repository to use Nickel to write development shell (Nixel). The goal is that, one day, you can actually just transparently call to Nix code and into Nixpkgs. Until then, I totally understand that nothing can be the power of levering Nixpkgs... so your approach makes sense :)
    11 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2023
    The LSP is aware of contracts (and the rest of the tooling, in particular `nickel query`) and is able to show "types" (really contracts), documentation, provide completion and so on. You can take a look at a simple Kubernetes example here: https://github.com/tweag/nickel/blob/master/examples/record-contract/record-contract.ncl

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nix and nickel you can also consider the following projects:

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

void-packages - The Void source packages collection

flatpak - Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework

homebrew-emacs-plus - Emacs Plus formulae for the Homebrew package manager

guix - Read-only mirror of GNU Guix — pull requests are ignored, see https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/en/guix.html#Submitting-Patches instead

NixOS-docker - DEPRECATED! Dockerfiles to package Nix in a minimal docker container

build-emacs-for-macos - Somewhat hacky script to automate building of Emac.app on macOS.

rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]

nix-darwin - nix modules for darwin

nixos - My NixOS Configurations

nixos-generators - Collection of image builders [maintainer=@Lassulus]