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What is the Flox Catalog?

A Flox catalog is a searchable index of packages that you can explore with flox search and then flox install to your environments. The built-in catalog contains a wide variety of open source packages you can use in your environments.

A package is a collection of computer programs and related data that are bundled for distribution together on a UNIX-based computer system. Packages are declared in the environment manifest.

Flox Catalog and nixpkgs

The Flox Catalog uses nixpkgs as an input. Upstream changes in nixpkgs are reflected in the Flox Catalog once the changes have reached a nixpkgs stable release and the environment has been updated with flox update. The Flox Catalog is currently tracking version 23.11 of nixpkgs. Flox has immediate term plans to add support for more versions.

Supported package metadata

  • pkg-path: unique location in the Flox Catalog.
  • version: semantic version of the package.
  • license: license metadata.
  • unfree: indicates if the software uses a license not defined as Open Source by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
  • broken: indicates if the package is marked as broken in nixpkgs.