Nixpacks
Nixpacks is an open-source build tool that converts application source code into OCI-compliant Docker images by combining language-specific providers, Nix packages, and Buildkit. Originally created by Railway as the build system powering the Railway platform, Nixpacks inspects a project's source, selects one or more providers (Node, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, Rust, PHP, Elixir, Deno, Crystal, .NET, Swift, Scala, Dart, Haskell, Gleam, Zig, Clojure, Lunatic, Cobol, Scheme, F#, Staticfile, and more), and produces a reproducible build plan composed of setup, install, build, and start phases. The plan declares Nix packages, apt packages, environment variables, commands, and cache directories, and can be customized via a `nixpacks.toml` file, CLI flags, or environment variables. Compared with Cloud Native Buildpacks, Nixpacks uses Nix as its package layer, ships as a single Rust CLI, and outputs a plain Dockerfile/OCI image without requiring a buildpack lifecycle. The project is MIT licensed and currently in maintenance mode; Railway recommends Railpack as the actively developed successor.
More than an index entry, but the surface is still mostly links rather than artifacts — the cohort most likely to move a full band from modest, well-targeted work.
API Evangelist profiles Nixpacks the way a machine reads it — 6 machine-readable artifacts across 5 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Nixpacks scores 15.4/100 (emerging), with a separate agent-readiness read of 0/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Nixpacks
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Nixpacks. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 5
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Nixpacks CLI
The Nixpacks command-line interface is the primary interface for generating build plans and producing Docker images from application source. Core commands include `nixpacks plan...
Nixpacks Build Plan
The Nixpacks build plan is the JSON representation of how a source directory will be turned into a container image. A plan declares the list of providers used, top-level `variab...
Nixpacks Configuration File (nixpacks.toml)
Projects can override or extend the auto-detected build plan by committing a `nixpacks.toml` (or `nixpacks.json`) file at the root of the repository. The configuration file mirr...
Nixpacks Language Providers
Providers are the pluggable modules that detect a language or framework in the source directory and contribute their portion of the build plan. Nixpacks ships with providers for...
Nixpacks GitHub Action
The official `iloveitaly/github-action-nixpacks` GitHub Action wraps the Nixpacks CLI so that CI pipelines can build and optionally push OCI images directly from a workflow with...
Security Posture 1
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Nixpacks — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 1
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Build 3
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 1
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 4
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/nixpacks · machine-readable index on apis.io