Nixpkgs is an ever-increasing collection of software packages for Nix and NixOS. Even with more than 80,000 packages, you easily run in a situation where there is a functionality that is not yet implemented.

Earlier this year, we wrote a tutorial on how to implement your own package in NixOS. The implementation of the package in the system was tedious and required keeping track of the package you wanted to implement.

Let’s dive into a practical example: LXD is a container and virtual machine manager. It endorses virtual machines natively since LXD 4.0. However, running on NixOS breaks the feature, and we have to find workarounds to use it. To allow LXD to start virtual machines on NixOS, we need a fix, and we want it to be both reproducible and portable.

To do so, we are using the lxd-agent feature which effectively fix the aforementionned issue.