nix-profile-manager

nix-profile-manager is a skill for Claude Code from YPares/agent-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (1,230 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

Guidance for managing a private Nix package profile, which is a user-owned place for installed tools and dependencies. It covers Nix flakes, package searches, profile commands, and package registries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or maintain a local Nix profile, add packages, search Nix packages, work with flakes, and configure registries.
Why use it?
It helps agents install tools without changing the whole computer or requiring administrator access. It also explains how to keep those tools available through PATH.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the nix-skills plugin — 2 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to create or maintain a local Nix profile, add packages, search Nix packages, work with flakes, and configure registries.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add YPares/agent-skills --skill nix-profile-manager
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/YPares/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install nix-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for nix-profile-manager

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for nix-profile-manager

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ypares/agent-skills/nix-profile-manager.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,230 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00034 $0.01230
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00615
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00246
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00123

Measured 11d ago against content hash d4a5f672d32e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

nix-profile-manager scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

This skill enables agents to maintain a local Nix profile in a user-provided directory, allowing dynamic installation of tools without requiring system-wide package management or sudo access.
nix-profile-manager/SKILL.md · 149 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Nix Profile Manager for Agents

Overview

This skill enables agents to maintain a local Nix profile in a user-provided directory, allowing dynamic installation of tools without requiring system-wide package management or sudo access.

Quick Start: Setting Up a Local Profile

Users should provide a directory in their PATH for the agent to manage, and ensure the AGENT_PROFILE env var contains this directory so the agent knows where it is.

Then the agent just does:

nix profile add --profile "$AGENT_PROFILE" "nixpkgs#git"

The --profile flag tells Nix to store the profile metadata in that location. The bin dir created by Nix in the profile must be in the PATH.

NOTE: on older Nix versions, the add sub-command was called install. Keep this in mind if you get errors saying that "add" does not exist.

Core Concepts

Profiles

A profile is a directory containing:

  • manifest.json - list of installed packages and their flake references
  • bin, lib, share, etc. - folders with symlinks to binaries, libs, docs in the Nix store

When you run nix profile add, Nix updates the manifest and recreates symlinks.

Flakes

A flake is a standardized Nix package collection with:

  • A flake.nix file defining inputs and outputs
  • Deterministic versioning via flake.lock
  • Multiple output schemes (packages, overlays, modules, etc.)

Common flakes:

  • nixpkgs - Standard package library (the default registry), usually an alias for github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable
  • Custom flakes from GitHub (e.g., github:user/repo)

Packages vs. Flakes

  • Package: A single tool (e.g., git, python311)
  • Flake: A collection of packages, accessed as <flake>#<package>

IMPORTANT: In some flakes (like nixpkgs) packages can be nested: <flake>#<scope>.<package>

Essential Commands

Search for Packages

# Search in nixpkgs flake:
nix search nixpkgs git

# Search in specific (fully qualified) flake
nix search "github:user/repo[/branch]" <package-name>

# Or get a more detailed JSON output
nix search nixpkgs python3 --json | jq '.[].pname'

Read the full file on GitHub · 149 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 149 lines · 34 tokens per session scan B d4a5f672d32e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nix-profile-manager is a skill published in the GitHub repository YPares/agent-skills (30 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,230 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.