Since release 15.09 there is a new TeX Live packaging that lives entirely under attribute texlive.

For basic usage just pull texlive.combined.scheme-basic for an environment with basic LaTeX support. It typically won't work to use separately installed packages together. Instead, you can build a custom set of packages like this: texlive.combine { inherit (texlive) scheme-small collection-langkorean algorithms cm-super; } There are all the schemes, collections and a few thousand packages, as defined upstream (perhaps with tiny differences). By default you only get executables and files needed during runtime, and a little documentation for the core packages. To change that, you need to add pkgFilter function to combine. texlive.combine { # inherit (texlive) whatever-you-want; pkgFilter = pkg: pkg.tlType == "run" || pkg.tlType == "bin" || pkg.pname == "cm-super"; # elem tlType [ "run" "bin" "doc" "source" ] # there are also other attributes: version, name } You can list packages e.g. by nix-repl. $ nix-repl nix-repl> :l <nixpkgs> nix-repl> texlive.collection-<TAB> Note that the wrapper assumes that the result has a chance to be useful. For example, the core executables should be present, as well as some core data files. The supported way of ensuring this is by including some scheme, for example scheme-basic, into the combination.

Some tools are still missing, e.g. luajittex; some apps aren't packaged/tested yet (asymptote, biber, etc.); feature/bug: when a package is rejected by pkgFilter, its dependencies are still propagated; in case of any bugs or feature requests, file a github issue or better a pull request and /cc @vcunat.