Nix comes with certain defaults about what packages can and cannot be installed, based on a package's metadata. By default, Nix will prevent installation if any of the following criteria are true: The packages is thought to be broken, and has had its meta.broken set to true. The package's meta.license is set to a license which is considered to be unfree. The package has known security vulnerabilities but has not or can not be updated for some reason, and a list of issues has been entered in to the package's meta.knownVulnerabilities. Each of these criteria can be altering the nixpkgs configuration. The nixpkgs configuration for a NixOS system is set in the configuration.nix, as in the following example: { nixpkgs.config = { allowUnfree = true; }; } However, this does not allow unfree software for individual users. Their configurations are managed separately. A user's of nixpkgs configuration is stored in a user-specific configuration file located at ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix. For example: { allowUnfree = true; }

There are two ways to try compiling a package which has been marked as broken. For allowing the build of a broken package once, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_BROKEN=1 For permanently allowing broken packages to be built, you may add allowBroken = true; to your user's configuration file, like this: { allowBroken = true; }

There are several ways to tweak how Nix handles a package which has been marked as unfree. To temporarily allow all unfree packages, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 It is possible to permanently allow individual unfree packages, while still blocking unfree packages by default using the allowUnfreePredicate configuration option in the user configuration file. This option is a function which accepts a package as a parameter, and returns a boolean. The following example configuration accepts a package and always returns false: { allowUnfreePredicate = (pkg: false); } A more useful example, the following configuration allows only allows flash player and visual studio code: { allowUnfreePredicate = (pkg: elem (builtins.parseDrvName pkg.name).name [ "flashplayer" "vscode" ]); } It is also possible to whitelist and blacklist licenses that are specifically acceptable or not acceptable, using whitelistedLicenses and blacklistedLicenses, respectively. The following example configuration whitelists the licenses amd and wtfpl: { whitelistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ amd wtfpl ]; } The following example configuration blacklists the gpl3 and agpl3 licenses: { blacklistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ agpl3 gpl3 ]; } A complete list of licenses can be found in the file lib/licenses.nix of the nixpkgs tree.

There are several ways to tweak how Nix handles a package which has been marked as unfree. To temporarily allow all insecure packages, you can use an environment variable for a single invocation of the nix tools: $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_INSECURE=1 It is possible to permanently allow individual insecure packages, while still blocking other insecure packages by default using the permittedInsecurePackages configuration option in the user configuration file. The following example configuration permits the installation of the hypothetically insecure package hello, version 1.2.3: { permittedInsecurePackages = [ "hello-1.2.3" ]; } It is also possible to create a custom policy around which insecure packages to allow and deny, by overriding the allowInsecurePredicate configuration option. The allowInsecurePredicate option is a function which accepts a package and returns a boolean, much like allowUnfreePredicate. The following configuration example only allows insecure packages with very short names: { allowInsecurePredicate = (pkg: (builtins.stringLength (builtins.parseDrvName pkg.name).name) <= 5); } Note that permittedInsecurePackages is only checked if allowInsecurePredicate is not specified.

You can define a function called packageOverrides in your local ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix to overide nix packages. It must be a function that takes pkgs as an argument and return modified set of packages. { packageOverrides = pkgs: rec { foo = pkgs.foo.override { ... }; }; }