Nix vs PHPBrew
Nix
nixos.orgPHPBrew
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Nix | PHPBrew |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Development Environment Managers | 8.3 (#11) | 7.5 (#34) |
| Integrations | The official documentation includes guides for GitHub Actions, Docker images, Terraform deployment, SSH provisioning, and distributed builds. | Its library lookup prefixes include Homebrew, MacPorts, Debian, Ubuntu, or a custom path. |
| Intended users | The documentation identifies developers, test engineers, DevOps engineers, system administrators, data scientists, students, and open source enthusiasts as likely users. | The project describes use for building and managing multiple PHP versions locally, including without root permission when installing in a home directory. |
| Purpose | Nix is a tool for package management and system configuration that supports reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. | PHPBrew builds and installs multiple PHP versions in a user's home directory. |
Plans
In their own words
Nix
Nix is a free package management and system configuration tool for creating reproducible, declarative systems. It builds packages in isolation to avoid undeclared dependencies and help keep builds consistent across machines. Users can define and share development and build environments across projects and languages, install software from URLs or source code, and use virtual machines for integration testing. Nix supports dependency resolution, lockfiles, workspaces and offline installation; its package formats include Nix expressions, derivations and flakes. The Nix Packages collection offers over 140,000 packages. The wider ecosystem supports remote builds and deployments, binary caches, cross compilation, atomic upgrades and rollbacks to earlier package versions. Nix runs on Linux and macOS, and on Windows through WSL2; multi-user Windows installation requires WSL systemd support. Documentation includes guides for GitHub Actions, Docker images, Terraform deployment, SSH provisioning and distributed builds. Nix is aimed at people familiar with command-line interfaces and plain-text editors, including developers, test engineers, DevOps engineers, system administrators, data scientists, students and open-source enthusiasts. It has no paid plan listed.