Building a NixOS CD is as easy as configuring your own computer. The idea is to use another module which will replace your configuration.nix to configure the system that would be installed on the CD. Default CD/DVD configurations are available inside nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd. To build them you have to set NIXOS_CONFIG before running nix-build to build the ISO. $ nix-build -A config.system.build.isoImage -I nixos-config=modules/installer/cd-dvd/installation-cd-minimal.nix Before burning your CD/DVD, you can check the content of the image by mounting anywhere like suggested by the following command: $ mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./result/iso/cd.iso /mnt/iso