Zen Browser for Nix

This is a flake for the Zen browser. Originally forked from the unmaintained MarceColl/zen-browser-flake, but heavily modified. GitHub Actions is configured to automatically check for updates daily.

The primary difference between this flake and most of the other forks available is it has more correct packaging that closely mirrors how Firefox is packaged in nixpkgs, using wrapFirefox. For instance Zen's desktop file is extracted directly from the binary instead of being provided manually.

The annoying update checks have been disabled by default through a Firefox policy. The browser cannot update itself when installed with Nix anyways, so these are entirely useless.

Similar to the firefox package in nixpkgs, you can set additional policies by using override on the extraPolicies property. See the derivation for more technical details.

To use, add it to the relevant NixOS configuration flake inputs:

inputs = {
  # ...
  zen-browser.url = "github:youwen5/zen-browser-flake";

  # optional, but recommended if you closely follow NixOS unstable so it shares
  # system libraries, and improves startup time
  # NOTE: if you experience a build failure with Zen, the first thing to check is to remove this line!
  zen-browser.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  # ...
}

Packages

This flake provides the zen-browser package, which is also its default package, for both x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux systems.

Additionally, zen-browser-unwrapped is provided (similar to firefox-bin-unwrapped). A tree of the provided packages is displayed below for your convenience.

packages
├───aarch64-linux
│   ├───default: package
│   ├───zen-browser: package
│   └───zen-browser-unwrapped: package
└───x86_64-linux
    ├───default: package
    ├───zen-browser: package
    └───zen-browser-unwrapped: package

Installation

The easiest way is to use the CLI imperatively:

nix profile install github:youwen5/zen-browser-flake

If you're on NixOS and/or home-manager, you should install it in your system or home configuration.

For example, in configuration.nix, add something similar to:

environment.systemPackages = [
  inputs.zen-browser.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
];

If you don't want to use flakes, you can add it like:

environment.systemPackages = 
  let
    zen-browser = import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/youwen5/zen-browser-flake/archive/master.tar.gz") {
      inherit pkgs;
    };
  in
  [
    zen-browser    
  ];

A binary called zen is provided as well as a desktop file that should show up in app launchers.

FAQ

How to run the update script locally?

There's a workflow configured that runs every day at 8PM Pacific Time to automatically check for any new releases from zen-browser/desktop and update the flake. If you want to run the script manually, just enter the repo's directory and run

nix run .#update

Is there a Cachix (binary cache)?

Since we're not building from source and just wrapping upstream binaries we don't really need a binary cache as the patching process should take just a few seconds.

If you're experiencing abnormally long build times you probably aren't overriding the nixpkgs input and it's duplicating a lot of system libraries. Just set inputs.zen-browser.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs" or something similar.

Caveats

As with all GPU accelerated programs, Zen may not be able to use GPU acceleration if not installed on NixOS (and if you didn't override its nixpkgs input to your system nixpkgs, if using NixOS).

This can be solved with nix-community/nixGL.

1Password

Zen has to be manually added to the list of browsers that 1Password will communicate with. See this wiki article for more information. To enable 1Password integration, you need to add the line zen to the file /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers.

License

The derivation in ./zen-browser-unwrapped.nix is mostly based on firefox-bin-unwrapped which is MIT licensed Copyright (c) 2003-2025 Eelco Dolstra and the Nixpkgs/NixOS contributors.

The rest of the code is licensed under the Unlicense and is released unencumbered into the public domain. Feel free to fork and use for whatever purposes.