Nix Store

The Nix store is a collection of store objects with references between them. The store object contains:

File System Object

either a file, directory or symlink

Store Path

reference to other store objects

Store Path

  /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1
  |--------| |------------------------------| |----------|
store directory            digest                 name

Nix can only refer to store paths if these path's do not cross the store directory boundaries. You can only copy store objects to another store if:

• source and target stores' directories match
• store object without any references