Intro

The Nix Daemon protocol is what’s used to communicate with the nix-daemon, either on the local system (in which case the communication happens via a Unix domain socket), or with a remote Nix (in which this is tunneled over SSH).

It uses a custom binary format which isn’t too documented. This reference here aims to serve as an in-depth documentation about some of the inner workings, data types etc.

A first implementation of this exists in griff/Nix.rs  .

Work is underway to port / factor this out into reusable building blocks into the nix-compat  crate.