Why Dendritic Nix?

The core idea

The purpose is social more than purely technical. These tools are an exploration on how to take Nix module sharing to a higher level — literally, since dendritic modules contain one or more classic non-dendritic modules.

The problem

Before Dendritic tools existed, every Nix configuration — even those following a dendritic style — was not made with re-usability in mind. User-specifics and host-specifics were always baked in. Evaluating a single module often demanded downloading all of the owner’s particular inputs.

The Nix community has a copy-paste culture: people re-invent the wheel in infinite ways because there is no good mechanism to share composable configuration units.

The problem is feature composability.

Functions are the answer

Being a fan of functional programming, the most composable things are functions:

# Just like any NixOS module can be a function:
{ pkgs, ... }: { <nixos-settings> }

# A dendritic aspect is a function returning multi-class configs:
{ host, user }: {
  nixos = { pkgs, ... }: { <nixos-settings> };
  darwin = { pkgs, ... }: { <darwin-settings> };
}

This exploration produced flake-aspects — a zero-dependency library focused on composability, not on wiring or building configurations.

flake-aspects allows aspects to be:

Parametric — using the Nix __functor pattern
Nestable — tree-structured, not flat flake.modules with string-based semantics
Composable — declaring real dependencies between aspects, not stringly-typed references

The ecosystem grew from there

den builds upon flake-aspects to answer specific NixOS/Darwin questions: how to define hosts and users, how to create schemas, how to include features across entities, how hosts and users configure each other bidirectionally.

flake-file makes modules truly self-contained — they can declare their own flake inputs using real Nix language features.

import-tree enables selecting subsets of a repository — since all Dendritic files have the same semantic meaning, you can cherry-pick exactly the parts you need.

dendrix ties it all together as a community index of browsable, importable aspects found across GitHub.

The vision

Imagine a world where:

You can browse a catalog of well-tested Nix configuration aspects
Cherry-picking an aspect automatically brings its required inputs
Configurations compose cleanly across NixOS, Darwin, and Home-Manager
Sharing a configuration is as simple as publishing a Nix module

That is what the Dendritic ecosystem is building toward. And it needs your help to get there.

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