After unpacking or checking out the Nix sources, issue the following commands: $ ./configure options... $ make $ make install Nix requires GNU Make so you may need to invoke gmake instead. When building from the Git repository, these should be preceded by the command: $ ./bootstrap.sh The installation path can be specified by passing the --prefix=prefix to configure. The default installation directory is /usr/local. You can change this to any location you like. You must have write permission to the prefix path. Nix keeps its store (the place where packages are stored) in /nix/store by default. This can be changed using --with-store-dir=path. It is best not to change the Nix store from its default, since doing so makes it impossible to use pre-built binaries from the standard Nixpkgs channels — that is, all packages will need to be built from source. Nix keeps state (such as its database and log files) in /nix/var by default. This can be changed using --localstatedir=path.