nix.dev/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to nix.dev

nix.dev is a community effort to collect, create, and maintain world-class learning resources for Nix.

We strongly encourage everyone interested to contribute by asking informed questions or directly proposing changes.

Make a pull request if you want to introduce an incremental change. Note our considerations on licensing and attribution.

Open an issue if you want to clarify something not evident from what is provided in this repository, or if you want to discuss a significant change before starting to work on it.

Code of conduct

Adapted from the Contributor Covenant and The Carpentries Code of Conduct:

• Use welcoming and inclusive language
• Show empathy and respect towards other people
• Be respectful of different viewpoints and experiences
• Give and gracefully accept constructive criticism
• Focus on what is best for the community

Updating reference manuals

With the current setup, the Nix manual hosted on nix.dev does not get updated automatically with new releases. The following manual steps are required:

• Regularly update the inputs to use the latest versions of the Nix release branches with nix shell --run "niv update"

  To avoid long build times, make sure Nix can be fetched from the cache. If it doesn't, find the latest commit that is built by Hydra. For example, to update the latest Nix release to 2.20:

  niv update nix-stable -b 2.20-maintenance -r 7599d4bbed3c188c72b547fc08c7b022e7d1c54f
  

• On each new Nix release, update the nix-latest to the corresponding release branch:

  niv update nix-latest -b 2.20-maintenance
  

• On each new Nixpkgs release, update nixpkgs-stable and nixpkgs-prev-stable and the corresponding Nix versions:

  niv update nixpkgs-stable -b nixos-24.05
  niv update nix-stable -b 2.19-maintenance
  niv update nixpkgs-prev-stable -b nixos-23.11
  niv update nix-prev-stable -b 2.18-maintenance
  

It would be nice to have efficient automatic updates.

Contributor guides

Please read Contributing Documentation.