nix-community/nix-ld

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1695 stars · 26 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

nix-ld is a shim dynamic linker that lets unpatched precompiled Linux binaries run on NixOS by installing itself at the conventional loader path and delegating to the real loader via NIX_LD environment variables. It is integrated into nixpkgs as a NixOS module enabled with programs.nix-ld.enable.

Use cases

• run unpatched dynamic binaries on NixOS
• run binaries installed via npm or pip without repatching on every update
• run proprietary software or games that verify their integrity
• run programs too large for the nix store
• avoid limitations of buildFHSUserEnv like setuid or nested sandboxes
• use direnv with precompiled executables

When to choose

• you are on NixOS and need to run precompiled binaries with hardcoded linker paths
• autoPatchelfHook is impractical because binaries update frequently or are huge
• you need setuid binaries or nested sandboxing that buildFHSUserEnv cannot provide

When to avoid

• you are not on NixOS and standard Linux loader paths already work
• you can simply patch binaries with autoPatchelfHook at build time
• you need a full FHS environment with a complete filesystem layout

Facets

library · maturity active

developer-tools configuration-management security operating-systems developer-tools self-hosted nixos dynamic-linker binary-compatibility nix rust shim linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="nix-community/nix-ld")