Nix Ninja – open-source Ninja-compatible build system for Nix
Hello, this is Edgar! We are open sourcing nix-ninja, an incremental build system for Nix that leverages dynamic derivations. For those unfamiliar, Nix is a powerful package manager and build system that ensures reproducible builds via strict dependency isolation. However, one of its limitations has been that it builds packages as monolithic units - if you change one source file, Nix rebuilds the entire package from scratch. nix-ninja solves this by bringing compilation unit level granularity to Nix builds. It targets ninja build files, a format for describing build graphs output by popular…
Nix Ninja – open-source Ninja-compatible build system for Nix launched on April 3, 2025 with 33 votes, #695 of 7,818 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Nix Ninja is an open-source incremental build system that works with Nix to rebuild only affected compilation units instead of entire packages when source files change. It processes Ninja build files from tools like CMake and meson, enabling fine-grained caching and faster builds while maintaining Nix's reproducible, dependency-isolated approach. The tool is designed for developers using Nix who want to reduce compilation time on incremental changes.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Ninja-compatible incremental build system for Nix. Contribute to pdtpartners/nix-ninja development by creating an account on GitHub.
Incremental compilation of Ninja build files using Nix Dynamic Derivations . Choosing ninja as the build graph representation lets us support any build system that outputs ninja like CMake, meson, premake, gn, etc. There are still major todos, and depends on experimental features from an unreleased version of Nix. Come help us get nix-ninja to be useful day-to-day and working with an official Nix release! First you need to use Nix 2.30 or later (newer than stable) and enable the following experimental features: # Builds a basic main.cpp. nix build github:pdtpartners/nix-ninja#example-hello # Builds a basic main.cpp with dependency inference for its header. nix build…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello, this is Edgar! We are open sourcing nix-ninja, an incremental build system for Nix that leverages dynamic derivations. For those unfamiliar, Nix is a powerful package manager and build system that ensures reproducible builds via strict dependency isolation. However, one of its limitations has been that it…
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