nix-search

A better and channel-compatible nix search for NixOS using only stable Nix tools.

Why?

I cannot get Flakes to work, no one was able to help me for days, so I decided to fix the Nix channels issues myself.

Unstable Nix versions (2.4+) break all of nix's subcommands including nix search, so I decided to make a better nix search that works with stable Nix versions.

Goals

The goals of nix-search is to be fast and useful. Nix 2.3's nix search is rather weak and slow in its searching capabilities, and Nix 2.4's nix search is even slower, so this aims to be better than that.

nix-search goes with an indexing-based approach, where it indexes packages and their attributes into a searching database. This allows for faster searching and more accurate results. Bluge is used for the indexing.

nix-search will also eventually feature a lightweight expression evaluator that will allow for more accurate results. This will allow for more flexible queries, such as nix-search -e 'description contains "foo" and name contains "bar"'.

Installation

Nix

You can install nix-search like so:

let
  nix-search = import (pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "diamondburned";
    repo = "nix-search";
    rev = "<REV>";
    sha256 = "<SHA256>";
  });
in

{
  environment.systemPackages = [ nix-search ];
}

If you're using Flakes, you can also add github:diamondburned/nix-search as an input and use nix-search.packages.${system}.default.

Go

go install libdb.so/nix-search/cmd/nix-search@latest

Usage

First, index the Nixpkgs tree:

nix-search --index

If you use Nix Flakes, then you can index the nixpkgs flake instead:

nix-search --index --flake nixpkgs

Then, search for packages:

nix-search firefox

Performance

nix-search is reasonably fast. It takes about 20 seconds to index the entire Nixpkgs tree, and searching is almost instantaneous.

―❤―▶ time nix-search --index

real	0m21.760s
user	2m36.436s
sys	0m30.729s

―❤―▶ time nix-search firefox > /dev/null

real	0m0.033s
user	0m0.028s
sys	0m0.006s