Nix sets

The set is the fundamental data structure in Nix. Derivations are really just sets of attributes passed into build scripts. A set is a list of key-value pairs (attributes) enclosed in curly braces with each attribute terminated by a semicolon.

Attributes can have arbitrary strings as keys.

Examples

example = {
  x = 123;
  "greet me" = "hello";
  ${foo} = true;
  inherit perl;
}

Fetching attributes

Attributes of a set can be accessed with the . operator. That is, example."greet me" evaluates to "hello". If foo is antiquotable, its value will be true, otherwise it will be omitted during evaluation.

We can use the or keywordᛦ to provide a default value.

logo