By default, NixOS’s nixos-rebuild command uses the NixOS and Nixpkgs sources provided by the nixos channel (kept in /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos). To modify NixOS, however, you should check out the latest sources from Git. This is as follows: $ git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs $ cd nixpkgs $ git remote add channels https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels $ git remote update channels This will check out the latest Nixpkgs sources to ./nixpkgs the NixOS sources to ./nixpkgs/nixos. (The NixOS source tree lives in a subdirectory of the Nixpkgs repository.) The remote channels refers to a read-only repository that tracks the Nixpkgs/NixOS channels (see for more information about channels). Thus, the Git branch channels/nixos-17.03 will contain the latest built and tested version available in the nixos-17.03 channel. It’s often inconvenient to develop directly on the master branch, since if somebody has just committed (say) a change to GCC, then the binary cache may not have caught up yet and you’ll have to rebuild everything from source. So you may want to create a local branch based on your current NixOS version: $ nixos-version 17.09pre104379.6e0b727 (Hummingbird) $ git checkout -b local 6e0b727 Or, to base your local branch on the latest version available in a NixOS channel: $ git remote update channels $ git checkout -b local channels/nixos-17.03 (Replace nixos-17.03 with the name of the channel you want to use.) You can use git merge or git rebase to keep your local branch in sync with the channel, e.g. $ git remote update channels $ git merge channels/nixos-17.03 You can use git cherry-pick to copy commits from your local branch to the upstream branch. If you want to rebuild your system using your (modified) sources, you need to tell nixos-rebuild about them using the -I flag: # nixos-rebuild switch -I nixpkgs=/my/sources/nixpkgs If you want nix-env to use the expressions in /my/sources, use nix-env -f /my/sources/nixpkgs, or change the default by adding a symlink in ~/.nix-defexpr: $ ln -s /my/sources/nixpkgs ~/.nix-defexpr/nixpkgs You may want to delete the symlink ~/.nix-defexpr/channels_root to prevent root’s NixOS channel from clashing with your own tree (this may break the command-not-found utility though). If you want to go back to the default state, you may just remove the ~/.nix-defexpr directory completely, log out and log in again and it should have been recreated with a link to the root channels.