installing-a-package.md

Installing a package

The command for managing installed packages is nix-env. We're going to install a program called hello which commonly used as the simplest example for packaging and exists in many distributions. It's only function is to print "Hello, world!".

$ nix-env -i hello --no-build-output
installing ‘hello-2.10’
building path(s) ‘/nix/store/rck77h9jvv1r9c80csk34icdjqg1iskd-user-environment’

Note
We add --no-build-output because the output of nix-env is quite verbose and drowns out the important details.

The newly installed package is in our PATH and we can just run it:

$ hello
Hello, world!