Using nix for computational social science workflows

The nix package manager is a powerful way to install exactly the software needed for a specific workflow. It also allows making those workflows reproducible—and humanly comprehensible—by specifying the exact versions of each program used. On top of that, because of the vast amount of software that is packaged for it, it makes experimenting with new packages extremely easy. I will share how I set up and use nix on ALICE so that I can bring my computational environment with me when running jobs on the cluster.