If you are using Linux or macOS, the easiest way to install Nix is to run the following command: $ bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install) This will perform a single-user installation of Nix, meaning that /nix is owned by the invoking user. You should run this under your usual user account, not as root. The script will invoke sudo to create /nix if it doesn’t already exist. If you don’t have sudo, you should manually create /nix first as root, e.g.: $ mkdir /nix $ chown alice /nix The install script will modify the first writable file from amongst .bash_profile, .bash_login and .profile to source ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh. You can set the NIX_INSTALLER_NO_MODIFY_PROFILE environment variable before executing the install script to disable this behaviour. You can also download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies. (This is what the install script at https://nixos.org/nix/install does automatically.) You should unpack it somewhere (e.g. in /tmp), and then run the script named install inside the binary tarball: alice$ cd /tmp alice$ tar xfj nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2 alice$ cd nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin alice$ ./install You can uninstall Nix simply by running: $ rm -rf /nix