Consider adding Nixpkgs for acquisition

[radical]

Please consider adding it to Nixpkgs as well — that's supported on Linux and macOS as well as some other lesser used OSes (if you care to support it, which you don't have to).

It's the least friction way to install development dependencies out there, as you can declare all necessary dev tooling deps in a single file —checked into Git — and it's auto-applied by a single command or by simply cd-ing into a directory, using direnv or similar

Originally posted by @KennethHoff in #13403

[joperezr]

🤖 Aspire triage pass — 2026-05-27 18:36 UTC

Area: area-acquisition
Kind: feature-request
Repro: n/a — request to publish Aspire CLI to Nixpkgs (cross-posted from #13403)
Affected version(s): n/a (acquisition channel request)
Severity: S4 — net-new install channel; existing channels unaffected

Urgency: ⚪ backlog — no milestone
Reason: feature request for an additional packaging channel; no regression, no broken scenario

Suggested owner(s): @radical (score 12)
Evidence:

• @radical closed ~6 area-acquisition issues as completed in the last 180d
• No merged area-acquisition PRs in the last 90d (sparse area), so PR-stream evidence is unavailable

Confidence: medium
Needs human?: yes — area is sparse, owner stream thin; please confirm acquisition-team buy-in before adding to backlog vs. closing as wont-fix

Dry-run mode — no labels or milestone applied. Reply /triage apply to promote, or edit and reapply.

[radical]

cc @maddymontaquila @DamianEdwards

[KennethHoff]

Nixpkgs in this context can mean two things:

1. Upstreaming it into https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
   • This is the preferred approach, as it requires no configuration for the end-user other than adding pkgs.aspire-cli to their personal flake.nix file, but it does rely on another GitHub repo.
2. Create a flake.nix file in this repository
   • This requires the user to add github:microsoft/aspire to the list of flake inputs as well as referencing the new flake input directly instead of through the pkgs helper, but it makes it entirely self-contained in this repository.