Reproducible Environments
- True cross-platform environments means you work across any stack with the same environment manager. Share and track environment versions, on any machine, for instant dev onboarding.
Ship with Speed
- Build and publish packages into a personal or team catalog to simplify collaboration and release your projects to the world on your own terms.
Nix for Everybody
- Whether a Nix pro or not, flox makes introducing Nix and its superpowers a joy.
Security & Compliance
- Meet the challenges of modern compliance standards with complete visibility into your software and its dependencies. Nix enables the most direct path to SBOM/SLSA compliance.
flox Catalog
- Build your own bespoke catalog for complete control over your package management. Source from the flox Catalog, a mirror to Nixpkgs providing semantic versioning, fixed upgrade schedules, and guaranteed cache hit.
Run Everywhere
- Deploy environments via containers or directly onto the host OS.
Why flox?
We think Nix is one of the few technologies left in the world that is extremely powerful but still too difficult for many engineers to use. flox is trying to change that—to get the world building with Nix. We think it’s too good to be anything less than the de facto standard for packaging software.
The histories of many visionary technologies include periods where they’re only adopted by the best engineers solving the hardest problems. Over time, the core technology evolves, and follow-on projects tear down the barriers to adoption less sophisticated users faced:
- Docker and Kubernetes made containerization ubiquitous by simplifying build and orchestration, but modern containers trace their heritage to FreeBSD Jails released 20 years ago.
- Linux and macOS put Unix in the hands of almost every developer in the world by providing beautiful user interfaces, but Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built Unix Version 1 back in 1970.
We think that today Nix is somewhere between these extremes. The community is growing faster than ever, and Nixpkgs has become one of the most active open source projects of all time. But Nix adoption is still much lower than Kubernetes and Docker. More importantly, it's much lower than it ought to be.
That's why we built flox to solve the problems that developers face adopting Nix at scale. Ultimately, we want to see more people contributing to Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOS and using the awesome tools you've built on top of them.
