Nix Pills - Chapter 2 - Install on Your Running System⚓︎
Derivations in the Nix store refer to other derivations which are themselves in the Nix store. They don’t use libc from our system or anywhere else. It’s a self-contained store of all the software we need to bootstrap up to any particular package.
In a multi-user installation, such as the one used in NixOS, the store is owned by root and multiple users can install and build software through a Nix daemon.
Nix also has a sqlite database, stored under /nix/var/nix/db, that keeps track of the dependencies between derivations.
You can inspect the database by installing sqlite, nix-shell -p sqlite, and then running sqlite3 /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite.
