Building a NixOS CD is as easy as configuring your own computer. The idea is to use another module which will replace your configuration.nix to configure the system that would be installed on the CD. Default CD/DVD configurations are available inside nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd. $ git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git $ cd nixpkgs/nixos $ nix-build -A config.system.build.isoImage -I nixos-config=modules/installer/cd-dvd/installation-cd-minimal.nix default.nix Before burning your CD/DVD, you can check the content of the image by mounting anywhere like suggested by the following command: # mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./result/iso/cd.iso /mnt/iso If you want to customize your NixOS CD in more detail, or generate other kinds of images, you might want to check out nixos-generators. This can also be a good starting point when you want to use Nix to build a 'minimal' image that doesn't include a NixOS installation.