NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution Eelco Dolstra Andres Loh¨ Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Utrecht University, The Netherlands
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract change after they have been built; rather, the system is updated to Existing package and system configuration management tools suf- a new configuration by changing the specification and rebuilding fer from an imperative model, where system administration actions the system from it. This allows a system to be built determinis- such as upgrading packages or changes to system configuration tically, and therefore reproducibly. It allows the user to roll back files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the sys- the system to previous configurations, since previous configura- tem. This leads to many problems, such as the inability to roll back tions are not overwritten. Perhaps most importantly, statelessness changes easily, to run multiple versions of a package side-by-side, makes configuration actions predictable: they do not mysteriously to reproduce a configuration deterministically on another machine, fail because of some unknown aspect of the state of the system. or to reliably upgrade a system. In this paper we show that we can We have previously shown how package management — the overcome these problems by moving to a purely functional system installation and management of software packages — can be done configuration model. This means that all static parts of a system in a purely functional way, in contrast to the imperative models (such as software packages, configuration files and system startup of conventional tools such as RPM (Foster-Johnson 2003).