Introduction

Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell — they are built by functions that don’t have side-effects, and they never change after they have been built. Nix stores packages in the Nix store, usually the directory /nix/store, where each package has its own unique subdirectory such as

/nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/

where b6gvzjyb2pg0… is a unique identifier for the package that captures all its dependencies (it’s a cryptographic hash of the package’s build dependency graph). This enables many powerful features.

Multiple versions

You can have multiple versions or variants of a package installed at the same time. This is especially important when different applications have dependencies on different versions of the same package — it prevents the “DLL hell”. Because of the hashing scheme, different versions of a package end up in different paths in the Nix store, so they don’t interfere with each other.

An important consequence is that operations like upgrading or uninstalling an application cannot break other applications, since these operations never “destructively” update or delete files that are used by other packages.

Complete dependencies

Nix helps you make sure that package dependency specifications are complete. In general, when you’re making a package for a package management system like RPM, you have to specify for each package what its dependencies are, but there are no guarantees that this specification is complete. If you forget a dependency, then the package will build and work correctly on your machine if you have the dependency installed, but not on the end user's machine if it's not there.

Since Nix on the other hand doesn’t install packages in “global” locations like /usr/bin but in package-specific directories, the risk of incomplete dependencies is greatly reduced. This is because tools such as compilers don’t search in per-packages directories such as /nix/store/5lbfaxb722zp…-openssl-0.9.8d/include, so if a package builds correctly on your system, this is because you specified the dependency explicitly. This takes care of the build-time dependencies.

Once a package is built, runtime dependencies are found by scanning binaries for the hash parts of Nix store paths (such as r8vvq9kq…). This sounds risky, but it works extremely well.

Multi-user support

Nix has multi-user support. This means that non-privileged users can securely install software. Each user can have a different profile, a set of packages in the Nix store that appear in the user’s PATH. If a user installs a package that another user has already installed previously, the package won’t be built or downloaded a second time. At the same time, it is not possible for one user to inject a Trojan horse into a package that might be used by another user.

Atomic upgrades and rollbacks

Since package management operations never overwrite packages in the Nix store but just add new versions in different paths, they are atomic. So during a package upgrade, there is no time window in which the package has some files from the old version and some files from the new version — which would be bad because a program might well crash if it’s started during that period.

And since packages aren’t overwritten, the old versions are still there after an upgrade. This means that you can roll back to the old version:

$ nix-env --upgrade -A nixpkgs.some-package
$ nix-env --rollback

Garbage collection

When you uninstall a package like this…

$ nix-env --uninstall firefox

the package isn’t deleted from the system right away (after all, you might want to do a rollback, or it might be in the profiles of other users). Instead, unused packages can be deleted safely by running the garbage collector:

$ nix-collect-garbage

This deletes all packages that aren’t in use by any user profile or by a currently running program.

Functional package language

Packages are built from Nix expressions, which is a simple functional language. A Nix expression describes everything that goes into a package build task (a “derivation”): other packages, sources, the build script, environment variables for the build script, etc. Nix tries very hard to ensure that Nix expressions are deterministic: building a Nix expression twice should yield the same result.

Because it’s a functional language, it’s easy to support building variants of a package: turn the Nix expression into a function and call it any number of times with the appropriate arguments. Due to the hashing scheme, variants don’t conflict with each other in the Nix store.

Transparent source/binary deployment

Nix expressions generally describe how to build a package from source, so an installation action like

$ nix-env --install -A nixpkgs.firefox

could cause quite a bit of build activity, as not only Firefox but also all its dependencies (all the way up to the C library and the compiler) would have to be built, at least if they are not already in the Nix store. This is a source deployment model. For most users, building from source is not very pleasant as it takes far too long. However, Nix can automatically skip building from source and instead use a binary cache, a web server that provides pre-built binaries. For instance, when asked to build /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0…-firefox-33.1 from source, Nix would first check if the file https://cache.nixos.org/b6gvzjyb2pg0….narinfo exists, and if so, fetch the pre-built binary referenced from there; otherwise, it would fall back to building from source.

Nix Packages collection

We provide a large set of Nix expressions containing hundreds of existing Unix packages, the Nix Packages collection (Nixpkgs).

Managing build environments

Nix is extremely useful for developers as it makes it easy to automatically set up the build environment for a package. Given a Nix expression that describes the dependencies of your package, the command nix-shell will build or download those dependencies if they’re not already in your Nix store, and then start a Bash shell in which all necessary environment variables (such as compiler search paths) are set.

For example, the following command gets all dependencies of the Pan newsreader, as described by its Nix expression:

$ nix-shell '<nixpkgs>' -A pan

You’re then dropped into a shell where you can edit, build and test the package:

[nix-shell]$ unpackPhase
[nix-shell]$ cd pan-*
[nix-shell]$ configurePhase
[nix-shell]$ buildPhase
[nix-shell]$ ./pan/gui/pan

Portability

Nix runs on Linux and macOS.

NixOS

NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix. It uses Nix not just for package management but also to manage the system configuration (e.g., to build configuration files in /etc). This means, among other things, that it is easy to roll back the entire configuration of the system to an earlier state. Also, users can install software without root privileges. For more information and downloads, see the NixOS homepage.

License

Nix is released under the terms of the GNU LGPLv2.1 or (at your option) any later version.

Quick Start

This chapter is for impatient people who don't like reading documentation. For more in-depth information you are kindly referred to subsequent chapters.

1. Install single-user Nix by running the following:

   $ bash <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)
   

   This will install Nix in /nix. The install script will create /nix using sudo, so make sure you have sufficient rights. (For other installation methods, see here.)

2. See what installable packages are currently available in the channel:

   $ nix-env -qaP
   nixpkgs.docbook_xml_dtd_43                    docbook-xml-4.3
   nixpkgs.docbook_xml_dtd_45                    docbook-xml-4.5
   nixpkgs.firefox                               firefox-33.0.2
   nixpkgs.hello                                 hello-2.9
   nixpkgs.libxslt                               libxslt-1.1.28
   …
   

3. Install some packages from the channel:

   $ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hello
   

   This should download pre-built packages; it should not build them locally (if it does, something went wrong).

4. Test that they work:

   $ which hello
   /home/eelco/.nix-profile/bin/hello
   $ hello
   Hello, world!
   

5. Uninstall a package:

   $ nix-env -e hello
   

6. You can also test a package without installing it:

   $ nix-shell -p hello
   

   This builds or downloads GNU Hello and its dependencies, then drops you into a Bash shell where the hello command is present, all without affecting your normal environment:

   [nix-shell:~]$ hello
   Hello, world!
   
   [nix-shell:~]$ exit
   
   $ hello
   hello: command not found
   

7. To keep up-to-date with the channel, do:

   $ nix-channel --update nixpkgs
   $ nix-env -u '*'
   

   The latter command will upgrade each installed package for which there is a “newer” version (as determined by comparing the version numbers).

8. If you're unhappy with the result of a nix-env action (e.g., an upgraded package turned out not to work properly), you can go back:

   $ nix-env --rollback
   

9. You should periodically run the Nix garbage collector to get rid of unused packages, since uninstalls or upgrades don't actually delete them:

   $ nix-collect-garbage -d
   

This section describes how to install and configure Nix for first-time use.

Supported Platforms

Nix is currently supported on the following platforms:

• Linux (i686, x86_64, aarch64).

• macOS (x86_64, aarch64).

Installing a Binary Distribution

The easiest way to install Nix is to run the following command:

$ sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)

This will run the installer interactively (causing it to explain what it is doing more explicitly), and perform the default "type" of install for your platform:

• single-user on Linux

• multi-user on macOS

  Notes on read-only filesystem root in macOS 10.15 Catalina +

  • It took some time to support this cleanly. You may see posts, examples, and tutorials using obsolete workarounds.
  • Supporting it cleanly made macOS installs too complex to qualify as single-user, so this type is no longer supported on macOS.

We recommend the multi-user install if it supports your platform and you can authenticate with sudo.

Single User Installation

To explicitly select a single-user installation on your system:

$ sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --no-daemon

This will perform a single-user installation of Nix, meaning that /nix is owned by the invoking user. You can run this under your usual user account or root. The script will invoke sudo to create /nix if it doesn’t already exist. If you don’t have sudo, you should manually create /nix first as root, e.g.:

$ mkdir /nix
$ chown alice /nix

The install script will modify the first writable file from amongst .bash_profile, .bash_login and .profile to source ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh. You can set the NIX_INSTALLER_NO_MODIFY_PROFILE environment variable before executing the install script to disable this behaviour.

You can uninstall Nix simply by running:

$ rm -rf /nix

Multi User Installation

The multi-user Nix installation creates system users, and a system service for the Nix daemon.

Supported Systems

• Linux running systemd, with SELinux disabled
• macOS

You can instruct the installer to perform a multi-user installation on your system:

$ sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

The multi-user installation of Nix will create build users between the user IDs 30001 and 30032, and a group with the group ID 30000. You can run this under your usual user account or root. The script will invoke sudo as needed.

Note

If you need Nix to use a different group ID or user ID set, you will have to download the tarball manually and edit the install script.

The installer will modify /etc/bashrc, and /etc/zshrc if they exist. The installer will first back up these files with a .backup-before-nix extension. The installer will also create /etc/profile.d/nix.sh.

Uninstalling

Linux

If you are on Linux with systemd:

1. Remove the Nix daemon service:

   sudo systemctl stop nix-daemon.service
   sudo systemctl disable nix-daemon.socket nix-daemon.service
   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   

2. Remove systemd service files:

   sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.socket
   

3. The installer script uses systemd-tmpfiles to create the socket directory. You may also want to remove the configuration for that:

   sudo rm /etc/tmpfiles.d/nix-daemon.conf
   

Remove files created by Nix:

sudo rm -rf /nix /etc/nix /etc/profile/nix.sh ~root/.nix-profile ~root/.nix-defexpr ~root/.nix-channels ~/.nix-profile ~/.nix-defexpr ~/.nix-channels

Remove build users and their group:

for i in $(seq 1 32); do
  sudo userdel nixbld$i
done
sudo groupdel nixbld

There may also be references to Nix in

• /etc/profile
• /etc/bashrc
• /etc/zshrc

which you may remove.

macOS

1. Edit /etc/zshrc and /etc/bashrc to remove the lines sourcing nix-daemon.sh, which should look like this:

   # Nix
   if [ -e '/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh' ]; then
     . '/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh'
   fi
   # End Nix
   

   If these files haven't been altered since installing Nix you can simply put the backups back in place:

   sudo mv /etc/zshrc.backup-before-nix /etc/zshrc
   sudo mv /etc/bashrc.backup-before-nix /etc/bashrc
   

   This will stop shells from sourcing the file and bringing everything you installed using Nix in scope.

2. Stop and remove the Nix daemon services:

   sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.nix-daemon.plist
   sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.nix-daemon.plist
   sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.darwin-store.plist
   sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.darwin-store.plist
   

   This stops the Nix daemon and prevents it from being started next time you boot the system.

3. Remove the nixbld group and the _nixbuildN users:

   sudo dscl . -delete /Groups/nixbld
   for u in $(sudo dscl . -list /Users | grep _nixbld); do sudo dscl . -delete /Users/$u; done
   

   This will remove all the build users that no longer serve a purpose.

4. Edit fstab using sudo vifs to remove the line mounting the Nix Store volume on /nix, which looks like UUID=<uuid> /nix apfs rw,noauto,nobrowse,suid,owners or LABEL=Nix\040Store /nix apfs rw,nobrowse. This will prevent automatic mounting of the Nix Store volume.

5. Edit /etc/synthetic.conf to remove the nix line. If this is the only line in the file you can remove it entirely, sudo rm /etc/synthetic.conf. This will prevent the creation of the empty /nix directory to provide a mountpoint for the Nix Store volume.

6. Remove the files Nix added to your system:

   sudo rm -rf /etc/nix /var/root/.nix-profile /var/root/.nix-defexpr /var/root/.nix-channels ~/.nix-profile ~/.nix-defexpr ~/.nix-channels
   

   This gets rid of any data Nix may have created except for the store which is removed next.

7. Remove the Nix Store volume:

   sudo diskutil apfs deleteVolume /nix
   

   This will remove the Nix Store volume and everything that was added to the store.

   If the output indicates that the command couldn't remove the volume, you should make sure you don't have an unmounted Nix Store volume. Look for a "Nix Store" volume in the output of the following command:

   diskutil list
   

   If you do see a "Nix Store" volume, delete it by re-running the diskutil deleteVolume command, but replace /nix with the store volume's diskXsY identifier.

Note

After you complete the steps here, you will still have an empty /nix directory. This is an expected sign of a successful uninstall. The empty /nix directory will disappear the next time you reboot.

You do not have to reboot to finish uninstalling Nix. The uninstall is complete. macOS (Catalina+) directly controls root directories and its read-only root will prevent you from manually deleting the empty /nix mountpoint.

macOS Installation

We believe we have ironed out how to cleanly support the read-only root on modern macOS. New installs will do this automatically.

This section previously detailed the situation, options, and trade-offs, but it now only outlines what the installer does. You don't need to know this to run the installer, but it may help if you run into trouble:

• create a new APFS volume for your Nix store
• update /etc/synthetic.conf to direct macOS to create a "synthetic" empty root directory to mount your volume
• specify mount options for the volume in /etc/fstab
  • rw: read-write
  • noauto: prevent the system from auto-mounting the volume (so the LaunchDaemon mentioned below can control mounting it, and to avoid masking problems with that mounting service).
  • nobrowse: prevent the Nix Store volume from showing up on your desktop; also keeps Spotlight from spending resources to index this volume
• if you have FileVault enabled
  • generate an encryption password
  • put it in your system Keychain
  • use it to encrypt the volume
• create a system LaunchDaemon to mount this volume early enough in the boot process to avoid problems loading or restoring any programs that need access to your Nix store

Installing a pinned Nix version from a URL

NixOS.org hosts version-specific installation URLs for all Nix versions since 1.11.16, at https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-version/install.

These install scripts can be used the same as the main NixOS.org installation script:

$ sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)

In the same directory of the install script are sha256 sums, and gpg signature files.

Installing from a binary tarball

You can also download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies. (This is what the install script at https://nixos.org/nix/install does automatically.) You should unpack it somewhere (e.g. in /tmp), and then run the script named install inside the binary tarball:

$ cd /tmp
$ tar xfj nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2
$ cd nix-1.8-x86_64-darwin
$ ./install

If you need to edit the multi-user installation script to use different group ID or a different user ID range, modify the variables set in the file named install-multi-user.

Installing Nix from Source

If no binary package is available or if you want to hack on Nix, you can build Nix from its Git repository.

Prerequisites

• GNU Autoconf (https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/) and the autoconf-archive macro collection (https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive/). These are needed to run the bootstrap script.

• GNU Make.

• Bash Shell. The ./configure script relies on bashisms, so Bash is required.

• A version of GCC or Clang that supports C++17.

• pkg-config to locate dependencies. If your distribution does not provide it, you can get it from http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config.

• The OpenSSL library to calculate cryptographic hashes. If your distribution does not provide it, you can get it from https://www.openssl.org.

• The libbrotlienc and libbrotlidec libraries to provide implementation of the Brotli compression algorithm. They are available for download from the official repository https://github.com/google/brotli.

• cURL and its library. If your distribution does not provide it, you can get it from https://curl.haxx.se/.

• The SQLite embedded database library, version 3.6.19 or higher. If your distribution does not provide it, please install it from http://www.sqlite.org/.

• The Boehm garbage collector to reduce the evaluator’s memory consumption (optional). To enable it, install pkgconfig and the Boehm garbage collector, and pass the flag --enable-gc to configure.

• The boost library of version 1.66.0 or higher. It can be obtained from the official web site https://www.boost.org/.

• The editline library of version 1.14.0 or higher. It can be obtained from the its repository https://github.com/troglobit/editline.

• The libsodium library for verifying cryptographic signatures of contents fetched from binary caches. It can be obtained from the official web site https://libsodium.org.

• Recent versions of Bison and Flex to build the parser. (This is because Nix needs GLR support in Bison and reentrancy support in Flex.) For Bison, you need version 2.6, which can be obtained from the GNU FTP server. For Flex, you need version 2.5.35, which is available on SourceForge. Slightly older versions may also work, but ancient versions like the ubiquitous 2.5.4a won't.

• The libseccomp is used to provide syscall filtering on Linux. This is an optional dependency and can be disabled passing a --disable-seccomp-sandboxing option to the configure script (Not recommended unless your system doesn't support libseccomp). To get the library, visit https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp.

• On 64-bit x86 machines only, libcpuid library is used to determine which microarchitecture levels are supported (e.g., as whether to have x86_64-v2-linux among additional system types). The library is available from its homepage http://libcpuid.sourceforge.net. This is an optional dependency and can be disabled by providing a --disable-cpuid to the configure script.

Obtaining the Source

The most recent sources of Nix can be obtained from its Git repository. For example, the following command will check out the latest revision into a directory called nix:

$ git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nix

Likewise, specific releases can be obtained from the tags of the repository.

Building Nix from Source

After cloning Nix's Git repository, issue the following commands:

$ ./bootstrap.sh
$ ./configure options...
$ make
$ make install

Nix requires GNU Make so you may need to invoke gmake instead.

The installation path can be specified by passing the --prefix=prefix to configure. The default installation directory is /usr/local. You can change this to any location you like. You must have write permission to the prefix path.

Nix keeps its store (the place where packages are stored) in /nix/store by default. This can be changed using --with-store-dir=path.

Warning

It is best not to change the Nix store from its default, since doing so makes it impossible to use pre-built binaries from the standard Nixpkgs channels — that is, all packages will need to be built from source.

Nix keeps state (such as its database and log files) in /nix/var by default. This can be changed using --localstatedir=path.

Using Nix within Docker

To run the latest stable release of Nix with Docker run the following command:

$ docker run -ti nixos/nix
Unable to find image 'nixos/nix:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from nixos/nix
5843afab3874: Pull complete
b52bf13f109c: Pull complete
1e2415612aa3: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:27f6e7f60227e959ee7ece361f75d4844a40e1cc6878b6868fe30140420031ff
Status: Downloaded newer image for nixos/nix:latest
35ca4ada6e96:/# nix --version
nix (Nix) 2.3.12
35ca4ada6e96:/# exit

What is included in Nix's Docker image?

The official Docker image is created using pkgs.dockerTools.buildLayeredImage (and not with Dockerfile as it is usual with Docker images). You can still base your custom Docker image on it as you would do with any other Docker image.

The Docker image is also not based on any other image and includes minimal set of runtime dependencies that are required to use Nix:

• pkgs.nix
• pkgs.bashInteractive
• pkgs.coreutils-full
• pkgs.gnutar
• pkgs.gzip
• pkgs.gnugrep
• pkgs.which
• pkgs.curl
• pkgs.less
• pkgs.wget
• pkgs.man
• pkgs.cacert.out
• pkgs.findutils

Docker image with the latest development version of Nix

To get the latest image that was built by Hydra run the following command:

$ curl -L https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nix/master/dockerImage.x86_64-linux/latest/download/1 | docker load
$ docker run -ti nix:2.5pre20211105

You can also build a Docker image from source yourself:

$ nix build ./\#hydraJobs.dockerImage.x86_64-linux
$ docker load -i ./result/image.tar.gz
$ docker run -ti nix:2.5pre20211105

Security

Nix has two basic security models. First, it can be used in “single-user mode”, which is similar to what most other package management tools do: there is a single user (typically root) who performs all package management operations. All other users can then use the installed packages, but they cannot perform package management operations themselves.

Alternatively, you can configure Nix in “multi-user mode”. In this model, all users can perform package management operations — for instance, every user can install software without requiring root privileges. Nix ensures that this is secure. For instance, it’s not possible for one user to overwrite a package used by another user with a Trojan horse.

Single-User Mode

In single-user mode, all Nix operations that access the database in prefix/var/nix/db or modify the Nix store in prefix/store must be performed under the user ID that owns those directories. This is typically root. (If you install from RPM packages, that’s in fact the default ownership.) However, on single-user machines, it is often convenient to chown those directories to your normal user account so that you don’t have to su to root all the time.

Multi-User Mode

To allow a Nix store to be shared safely among multiple users, it is important that users are not able to run builders that modify the Nix store or database in arbitrary ways, or that interfere with builds started by other users. If they could do so, they could install a Trojan horse in some package and compromise the accounts of other users.

To prevent this, the Nix store and database are owned by some privileged user (usually root) and builders are executed under special user accounts (usually named nixbld1, nixbld2, etc.). When a unprivileged user runs a Nix command, actions that operate on the Nix store (such as builds) are forwarded to a Nix daemon running under the owner of the Nix store/database that performs the operation.

Note

Multi-user mode has one important limitation: only root and a set of trusted users specified in nix.conf can specify arbitrary binary caches. So while unprivileged users may install packages from arbitrary Nix expressions, they may not get pre-built binaries.

Setting up the build users

The build users are the special UIDs under which builds are performed. They should all be members of the build users group nixbld. This group should have no other members. The build users should not be members of any other group. On Linux, you can create the group and users as follows:

$ groupadd -r nixbld
$ for n in $(seq 1 10); do useradd -c "Nix build user $n" \
    -d /var/empty -g nixbld -G nixbld -M -N -r -s "$(which nologin)" \
    nixbld$n; done

This creates 10 build users. There can never be more concurrent builds than the number of build users, so you may want to increase this if you expect to do many builds at the same time.

Running the daemon

The Nix daemon should be started as follows (as root):

$ nix-daemon

You’ll want to put that line somewhere in your system’s boot scripts.

To let unprivileged users use the daemon, they should set the NIX_REMOTE environment variable to daemon. So you should put a line like

export NIX_REMOTE=daemon

into the users’ login scripts.

Restricting access

To limit which users can perform Nix operations, you can use the permissions on the directory /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket. For instance, if you want to restrict the use of Nix to the members of a group called nix-users, do

$ chgrp nix-users /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket
$ chmod ug=rwx,o= /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket

This way, users who are not in the nix-users group cannot connect to the Unix domain socket /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket, so they cannot perform Nix operations.

Environment Variables

To use Nix, some environment variables should be set. In particular, PATH should contain the directories prefix/bin and ~/.nix-profile/bin. The first directory contains the Nix tools themselves, while ~/.nix-profile is a symbolic link to the current user environment (an automatically generated package consisting of symlinks to installed packages). The simplest way to set the required environment variables is to include the file prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh in your ~/.profile (or similar), like this:

source prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh

NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE

If you need to specify a custom certificate bundle to account for an HTTPS-intercepting man in the middle proxy, you must specify the path to the certificate bundle in the environment variable NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE.

If you don't specify a NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE manually, Nix will install and use its own certificate bundle.

Set the environment variable and install Nix

$ export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt
$ sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)

In the shell profile and rc files (for example, /etc/bashrc, /etc/zshrc), add the following line:

export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt

Note

You must not add the export and then do the install, as the Nix installer will detect the presence of Nix configuration, and abort.

NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE with macOS and the Nix daemon

On macOS you must specify the environment variable for the Nix daemon service, then restart it:

$ sudo launchctl setenv NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE /etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt
$ sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.nixos.nix-daemon

Proxy Environment Variables

The Nix installer has special handling for these proxy-related environment variables: http_proxy, https_proxy, ftp_proxy, no_proxy, HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY, FTP_PROXY, NO_PROXY.

If any of these variables are set when running the Nix installer, then the installer will create an override file at /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service.d/override.conf so nix-daemon will use them.

Upgrading Nix

Multi-user Nix users on macOS can upgrade Nix by running: sudo -i sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix && launchctl remove org.nixos.nix-daemon && launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.nix-daemon.plist'

Single-user installations of Nix should run this: nix-channel --update; nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix nixpkgs.cacert

Multi-user Nix users on Linux should run this with sudo: nix-channel --update; nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix nixpkgs.cacert; systemctl daemon-reload; systemctl restart nix-daemon

This chapter discusses how to do package management with Nix, i.e., how to obtain, install, upgrade, and erase packages. This is the “user’s” perspective of the Nix system — people who want to create packages should consult the chapter on the Nix language.

Basic Package Management

The main command for package management is nix-env. You can use it to install, upgrade, and erase packages, and to query what packages are installed or are available for installation.

In Nix, different users can have different “views” on the set of installed applications. That is, there might be lots of applications present on the system (possibly in many different versions), but users can have a specific selection of those active — where “active” just means that it appears in a directory in the user’s PATH. Such a view on the set of installed applications is called a user environment, which is just a directory tree consisting of symlinks to the files of the active applications.

Components are installed from a set of Nix expressions that tell Nix how to build those packages, including, if necessary, their dependencies. There is a collection of Nix expressions called the Nixpkgs package collection that contains packages ranging from basic development stuff such as GCC and Glibc, to end-user applications like Mozilla Firefox. (Nix is however not tied to the Nixpkgs package collection; you could write your own Nix expressions based on Nixpkgs, or completely new ones.)

You can manually download the latest version of Nixpkgs from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs. However, it’s much more convenient to use the Nixpkgs channel, since it makes it easy to stay up to date with new versions of Nixpkgs. Nixpkgs is automatically added to your list of “subscribed” channels when you install Nix. If this is not the case for some reason, you can add it as follows:

$ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
$ nix-channel --update

Note

On NixOS, you’re automatically subscribed to a NixOS channel corresponding to your NixOS major release (e.g. http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-21.11). A NixOS channel is identical to the Nixpkgs channel, except that it contains only Linux binaries and is updated only if a set of regression tests succeed.

You can view the set of available packages in Nixpkgs:

$ nix-env -qaP
nixpkgs.aterm                       aterm-2.2
nixpkgs.bash                        bash-3.0
nixpkgs.binutils                    binutils-2.15
nixpkgs.bison                       bison-1.875d
nixpkgs.blackdown                   blackdown-1.4.2
nixpkgs.bzip2                       bzip2-1.0.2
…

The flag -q specifies a query operation, -a means that you want to show the “available” (i.e., installable) packages, as opposed to the installed packages, and -P prints the attribute paths that can be used to unambiguously select a package for installation (listed in the first column). If you downloaded Nixpkgs yourself, or if you checked it out from GitHub, then you need to pass the path to your Nixpkgs tree using the -f flag:

$ nix-env -qaPf /path/to/nixpkgs
aterm                               aterm-2.2
bash                                bash-3.0
…

where /path/to/nixpkgs is where you’ve unpacked or checked out Nixpkgs.

You can filter the packages by name:

$ nix-env -qaP firefox
nixpkgs.firefox-esr                 firefox-91.3.0esr
nixpkgs.firefox                     firefox-94.0.1

and using regular expressions:

$ nix-env -qaP 'firefox.*'

It is also possible to see the status of available packages, i.e., whether they are installed into the user environment and/or present in the system:

$ nix-env -qaPs
…
-PS  nixpkgs.bash                bash-3.0
--S  nixpkgs.binutils            binutils-2.15
IPS  nixpkgs.bison               bison-1.875d
…

The first character (I) indicates whether the package is installed in your current user environment. The second (P) indicates whether it is present on your system (in which case installing it into your user environment would be a very quick operation). The last one (S) indicates whether there is a so-called substitute for the package, which is Nix’s mechanism for doing binary deployment. It just means that Nix knows that it can fetch a pre-built package from somewhere (typically a network server) instead of building it locally.

You can install a package using nix-env -iA. For instance,

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.subversion

will install the package called subversion from nixpkgs channel (which is, of course, the Subversion version management system).

Note

When you ask Nix to install a package, it will first try to get it in pre-compiled form from a binary cache. By default, Nix will use the binary cache https://cache.nixos.org; it contains binaries for most packages in Nixpkgs. Only if no binary is available in the binary cache, Nix will build the package from source. So if nix-env -iA nixpkgs.subversion results in Nix building stuff from source, then either the package is not built for your platform by the Nixpkgs build servers, or your version of Nixpkgs is too old or too new. For instance, if you have a very recent checkout of Nixpkgs, then the Nixpkgs build servers may not have had a chance to build everything and upload the resulting binaries to https://cache.nixos.org. The Nixpkgs channel is only updated after all binaries have been uploaded to the cache, so if you stick to the Nixpkgs channel (rather than using a Git checkout of the Nixpkgs tree), you will get binaries for most packages.

Naturally, packages can also be uninstalled. Unlike when installing, you will need to use the derivation name (though the version part can be omitted), instead of the attribute path, as nix-env does not record which attribute was used for installing:

$ nix-env -e subversion

Upgrading to a new version is just as easy. If you have a new release of Nix Packages, you can do:

$ nix-env -uA nixpkgs.subversion

This will only upgrade Subversion if there is a “newer” version in the new set of Nix expressions, as defined by some pretty arbitrary rules regarding ordering of version numbers (which generally do what you’d expect of them). To just unconditionally replace Subversion with whatever version is in the Nix expressions, use -i instead of -u; -i will remove whatever version is already installed.

You can also upgrade all packages for which there are newer versions:

$ nix-env -u

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to ask what nix-env would do, without actually doing it. For instance, to find out what packages would be upgraded by nix-env -u, you can do

$ nix-env -u --dry-run
(dry run; not doing anything)
upgrading `libxslt-1.1.0' to `libxslt-1.1.10'
upgrading `graphviz-1.10' to `graphviz-1.12'
upgrading `coreutils-5.0' to `coreutils-5.2.1'

Profiles

Profiles and user environments are Nix’s mechanism for implementing the ability to allow different users to have different configurations, and to do atomic upgrades and rollbacks. To understand how they work, it’s useful to know a bit about how Nix works. In Nix, packages are stored in unique locations in the Nix store (typically, /nix/store). For instance, a particular version of the Subversion package might be stored in a directory /nix/store/dpmvp969yhdqs7lm2r1a3gng7pyq6vy4-subversion-1.1.3/, while another version might be stored in /nix/store/5mq2jcn36ldlmh93yj1n8s9c95pj7c5s-subversion-1.1.2. The long strings prefixed to the directory names are cryptographic hashes (to be precise, 160-bit truncations of SHA-256 hashes encoded in a base-32 notation) of all inputs involved in building the package — sources, dependencies, compiler flags, and so on. So if two packages differ in any way, they end up in different locations in the file system, so they don’t interfere with each other. Here is what a part of a typical Nix store looks like:

Of course, you wouldn’t want to type

$ /nix/store/dpmvp969yhdq...-subversion-1.1.3/bin/svn

every time you want to run Subversion. Of course we could set up the PATH environment variable to include the bin directory of every package we want to use, but this is not very convenient since changing PATH doesn’t take effect for already existing processes. The solution Nix uses is to create directory trees of symlinks to activated packages. These are called user environments and they are packages themselves (though automatically generated by nix-env), so they too reside in the Nix store. For instance, in the figure above, the user environment /nix/store/0c1p5z4kda11...-user-env contains a symlink to just Subversion 1.1.2 (arrows in the figure indicate symlinks). This would be what we would obtain if we had done

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.subversion

on a set of Nix expressions that contained Subversion 1.1.2.

This doesn’t in itself solve the problem, of course; you wouldn’t want to type /nix/store/0c1p5z4kda11...-user-env/bin/svn either. That’s why there are symlinks outside of the store that point to the user environments in the store; for instance, the symlinks default-42-link and default-43-link in the example. These are called generations since every time you perform a nix-env operation, a new user environment is generated based on the current one. For instance, generation 43 was created from generation 42 when we did

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.subversion nixpkgs.firefox

on a set of Nix expressions that contained Firefox and a new version of Subversion.

Generations are grouped together into profiles so that different users don’t interfere with each other if they don’t want to. For example:

$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/
...
lrwxrwxrwx  1 eelco ... default-42-link -> /nix/store/0c1p5z4kda11...-user-env
lrwxrwxrwx  1 eelco ... default-43-link -> /nix/store/3aw2pdyx2jfc...-user-env
lrwxrwxrwx  1 eelco ... default -> default-43-link

This shows a profile called default. The file default itself is actually a symlink that points to the current generation. When we do a nix-env operation, a new user environment and generation link are created based on the current one, and finally the default symlink is made to point at the new generation. This last step is atomic on Unix, which explains how we can do atomic upgrades. (Note that the building/installing of new packages doesn’t interfere in any way with old packages, since they are stored in different locations in the Nix store.)

If you find that you want to undo a nix-env operation, you can just do

$ nix-env --rollback

which will just make the current generation link point at the previous link. E.g., default would be made to point at default-42-link. You can also switch to a specific generation:

$ nix-env --switch-generation 43

which in this example would roll forward to generation 43 again. You can also see all available generations:

$ nix-env --list-generations

You generally wouldn’t have /nix/var/nix/profiles/some-profile/bin in your PATH. Rather, there is a symlink ~/.nix-profile that points to your current profile. This means that you should put ~/.nix-profile/bin in your PATH (and indeed, that’s what the initialisation script /nix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh does). This makes it easier to switch to a different profile. You can do that using the command nix-env --switch-profile:

$ nix-env --switch-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/my-profile

$ nix-env --switch-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/default

These commands switch to the my-profile and default profile, respectively. If the profile doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically. You should be careful about storing a profile in another location than the profiles directory, since otherwise it might not be used as a root of the garbage collector.

All nix-env operations work on the profile pointed to by ~/.nix-profile, but you can override this using the --profile option (abbreviation -p):

$ nix-env -p /nix/var/nix/profiles/other-profile -iA nixpkgs.subversion

This will not change the ~/.nix-profile symlink.

Garbage Collection

nix-env operations such as upgrades (-u) and uninstall (-e) never actually delete packages from the system. All they do (as shown above) is to create a new user environment that no longer contains symlinks to the “deleted” packages.

Of course, since disk space is not infinite, unused packages should be removed at some point. You can do this by running the Nix garbage collector. It will remove from the Nix store any package not used (directly or indirectly) by any generation of any profile.

Note however that as long as old generations reference a package, it will not be deleted. After all, we wouldn’t be able to do a rollback otherwise. So in order for garbage collection to be effective, you should also delete (some) old generations. Of course, this should only be done if you are certain that you will not need to roll back.

To delete all old (non-current) generations of your current profile:

$ nix-env --delete-generations old

Instead of old you can also specify a list of generations, e.g.,

$ nix-env --delete-generations 10 11 14

To delete all generations older than a specified number of days (except the current generation), use the d suffix. For example,

$ nix-env --delete-generations 14d

deletes all generations older than two weeks.

After removing appropriate old generations you can run the garbage collector as follows:

$ nix-store --gc

The behaviour of the garbage collector is affected by the keep-derivations (default: true) and keep-outputs (default: false) options in the Nix configuration file. The defaults will ensure that all derivations that are build-time dependencies of garbage collector roots will be kept and that all output paths that are runtime dependencies will be kept as well. All other derivations or paths will be collected. (This is usually what you want, but while you are developing it may make sense to keep outputs to ensure that rebuild times are quick.) If you are feeling uncertain, you can also first view what files would be deleted:

$ nix-store --gc --print-dead

Likewise, the option --print-live will show the paths that won’t be deleted.

There is also a convenient little utility nix-collect-garbage, which when invoked with the -d (--delete-old) switch deletes all old generations of all profiles in /nix/var/nix/profiles. So

$ nix-collect-garbage -d

is a quick and easy way to clean up your system.

Garbage Collector Roots

The roots of the garbage collector are all store paths to which there are symlinks in the directory prefix/nix/var/nix/gcroots. For instance, the following command makes the path /nix/store/d718ef...-foo a root of the collector:

$ ln -s /nix/store/d718ef...-foo /nix/var/nix/gcroots/bar

That is, after this command, the garbage collector will not remove /nix/store/d718ef...-foo or any of its dependencies.

Subdirectories of prefix/nix/var/nix/gcroots are also searched for symlinks. Symlinks to non-store paths are followed and searched for roots, but symlinks to non-store paths inside the paths reached in that way are not followed to prevent infinite recursion.

Channels

If you want to stay up to date with a set of packages, it’s not very convenient to manually download the latest set of Nix expressions for those packages and upgrade using nix-env. Fortunately, there’s a better way: Nix channels.

A Nix channel is just a URL that points to a place that contains a set of Nix expressions and a manifest. Using the command nix-channel you can automatically stay up to date with whatever is available at that URL.

To see the list of official NixOS channels, visit https://nixos.org/channels.

You can “subscribe” to a channel using nix-channel --add, e.g.,

$ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable

subscribes you to a channel that always contains that latest version of the Nix Packages collection. (Subscribing really just means that the URL is added to the file ~/.nix-channels, where it is read by subsequent calls to nix-channel --update.) You can “unsubscribe” using nix-channel --remove:

$ nix-channel --remove nixpkgs

To obtain the latest Nix expressions available in a channel, do

$ nix-channel --update

This downloads and unpacks the Nix expressions in every channel (downloaded from url/nixexprs.tar.bz2). It also makes the union of each channel’s Nix expressions available by default to nix-env operations (via the symlink ~/.nix-defexpr/channels). Consequently, you can then say

$ nix-env -u

to upgrade all packages in your profile to the latest versions available in the subscribed channels.

Sharing Packages Between Machines

Sometimes you want to copy a package from one machine to another. Or, you want to install some packages and you know that another machine already has some or all of those packages or their dependencies. In that case there are mechanisms to quickly copy packages between machines.

Serving a Nix store via HTTP

You can easily share the Nix store of a machine via HTTP. This allows other machines to fetch store paths from that machine to speed up installations. It uses the same binary cache mechanism that Nix usually uses to fetch pre-built binaries from https://cache.nixos.org.

The daemon that handles binary cache requests via HTTP, nix-serve, is not part of the Nix distribution, but you can install it from Nixpkgs:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix-serve

You can then start the server, listening for HTTP connections on whatever port you like:

$ nix-serve -p 8080

To check whether it works, try the following on the client:

$ curl http://avalon:8080/nix-cache-info

which should print something like:

StoreDir: /nix/store
WantMassQuery: 1
Priority: 30

On the client side, you can tell Nix to use your binary cache using --option extra-binary-caches, e.g.:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.firefox --option extra-binary-caches http://avalon:8080/

The option extra-binary-caches tells Nix to use this binary cache in addition to your default caches, such as https://cache.nixos.org. Thus, for any path in the closure of Firefox, Nix will first check if the path is available on the server avalon or another binary caches. If not, it will fall back to building from source.

You can also tell Nix to always use your binary cache by adding a line to the nix.conf configuration file like this:

binary-caches = http://avalon:8080/ https://cache.nixos.org/

Copying Closures via SSH

The command nix-copy-closure copies a Nix store path along with all its dependencies to or from another machine via the SSH protocol. It doesn’t copy store paths that are already present on the target machine. For example, the following command copies Firefox with all its dependencies:

$ nix-copy-closure --to alice@itchy.example.org $(type -p firefox)

See the manpage for nix-copy-closure for details.

With nix-store --export and nix-store --import you can write the closure of a store path (that is, the path and all its dependencies) to a file, and then unpack that file into another Nix store. For example,

$ nix-store --export $(nix-store -qR $(type -p firefox)) > firefox.closure

writes the closure of Firefox to a file. You can then copy this file to another machine and install the closure:

$ nix-store --import < firefox.closure

Any store paths in the closure that are already present in the target store are ignored. It is also possible to pipe the export into another command, e.g. to copy and install a closure directly to/on another machine:

$ nix-store --export $(nix-store -qR $(type -p firefox)) | bzip2 | \
    ssh alice@itchy.example.org "bunzip2 | nix-store --import"

However, nix-copy-closure is generally more efficient because it only copies paths that are not already present in the target Nix store.

Serving a Nix store via SSH

You can tell Nix to automatically fetch needed binaries from a remote Nix store via SSH. For example, the following installs Firefox, automatically fetching any store paths in Firefox’s closure if they are available on the server avalon:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.firefox --substituters ssh://alice@avalon

This works similar to the binary cache substituter that Nix usually uses, only using SSH instead of HTTP: if a store path P is needed, Nix will first check if it’s available in the Nix store on avalon. If not, it will fall back to using the binary cache substituter, and then to building from source.

Note

The SSH substituter currently does not allow you to enter an SSH passphrase interactively. Therefore, you should use ssh-add to load the decrypted private key into ssh-agent.

You can also copy the closure of some store path, without installing it into your profile, e.g.

$ nix-store -r /nix/store/m85bxg…-firefox-34.0.5 --substituters
ssh://alice@avalon

This is essentially equivalent to doing

$ nix-copy-closure --from alice@avalon
/nix/store/m85bxg…-firefox-34.0.5

You can use SSH’s forced command feature to set up a restricted user account for SSH substituter access, allowing read-only access to the local Nix store, but nothing more. For example, add the following lines to sshd_config to restrict the user nix-ssh:

Match User nix-ssh
  AllowAgentForwarding no
  AllowTcpForwarding no
  PermitTTY no
  PermitTunnel no
  X11Forwarding no
  ForceCommand nix-store --serve
Match All

On NixOS, you can accomplish the same by adding the following to your configuration.nix:

nix.sshServe.enable = true;
nix.sshServe.keys = [ "ssh-dss AAAAB3NzaC1k... bob@example.org" ];

where the latter line lists the public keys of users that are allowed to connect.

Serving a Nix store via S3

Nix has built-in support for storing and fetching store paths from Amazon S3 and S3-compatible services. This uses the same binary cache mechanism that Nix usually uses to fetch prebuilt binaries from cache.nixos.org.

The following options can be specified as URL parameters to the S3 URL:

• profile
  The name of the AWS configuration profile to use. By default Nix will use the default profile.

• region
  The region of the S3 bucket. us–east-1 by default.

  If your bucket is not in us–east-1, you should always explicitly specify the region parameter.

• endpoint
  The URL to your S3-compatible service, for when not using Amazon S3. Do not specify this value if you're using Amazon S3.

  Note

  This endpoint must support HTTPS and will use path-based addressing instead of virtual host based addressing.

• scheme
  The scheme used for S3 requests, https (default) or http. This option allows you to disable HTTPS for binary caches which don't support it.

  Note

  HTTPS should be used if the cache might contain sensitive information.

In this example we will use the bucket named example-nix-cache.

Anonymous Reads to your S3-compatible binary cache

If your binary cache is publicly accessible and does not require authentication, the simplest and easiest way to use Nix with your S3 compatible binary cache is to use the HTTP URL for that cache.

For AWS S3 the binary cache URL for example bucket will be exactly https://example-nix-cache.s3.amazonaws.com or s3://example-nix-cache. For S3 compatible binary caches, consult that cache's documentation.

Your bucket will need the following bucket policy:

{
    "Id": "DirectReads",
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "AllowDirectReads",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::example-nix-cache",
                "arn:aws:s3:::example-nix-cache/*"
            ],
            "Principal": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Authenticated Reads to your S3 binary cache

For AWS S3 the binary cache URL for example bucket will be exactly s3://example-nix-cache.

Nix will use the default credential provider chain for authenticating requests to Amazon S3.

Nix supports authenticated reads from Amazon S3 and S3 compatible binary caches.

Your bucket will need a bucket policy allowing the desired users to perform the s3:GetObject and s3:GetBucketLocation action on all objects in the bucket. The anonymous policy given above can be updated to have a restricted Principal to support this.

Authenticated Writes to your S3-compatible binary cache

Nix support fully supports writing to Amazon S3 and S3 compatible buckets. The binary cache URL for our example bucket will be s3://example-nix-cache.

Nix will use the default credential provider chain for authenticating requests to Amazon S3.

Your account will need the following IAM policy to upload to the cache:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "UploadToCache",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
        "s3:GetBucketLocation",
        "s3:GetObject",
        "s3:ListBucket",
        "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads",
        "s3:ListMultipartUploadParts",
        "s3:PutObject"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::example-nix-cache",
        "arn:aws:s3:::example-nix-cache/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Examples

To upload with a specific credential profile for Amazon S3:

$ nix copy nixpkgs.hello \
  --to 's3://example-nix-cache?profile=cache-upload&region=eu-west-2'

To upload to an S3-compatible binary cache:

$ nix copy nixpkgs.hello --to \
  's3://example-nix-cache?profile=cache-upload&scheme=https&endpoint=minio.example.com'

Nix Language

The Nix language is

• domain-specific

  It only exists for the Nix package manager: to describe packages and configurations as well as their variants and compositions. It is not intended for general purpose use.

• declarative

  There is no notion of executing sequential steps. Dependencies between operations are established only through data.

• pure

  Values cannot change during computation. Functions always produce the same output if their input does not change.

• functional

  Functions are like any other value. Functions can be assigned to names, taken as arguments, or returned by functions.

• lazy

  Expressions are only evaluated when their value is needed.

• dynamically typed

  Type errors are only detected when expressions are evaluated.

Overview

This is an incomplete overview of language features, by example.

''
  multi
   line
    string
''

Data Types

Primitives

• String

  Strings can be written in three ways.

  The most common way is to enclose the string between double quotes, e.g., "foo bar". Strings can span multiple lines. The special characters " and \ and the character sequence ${ must be escaped by prefixing them with a backslash (\). Newlines, carriage returns and tabs can be written as \n, \r and \t, respectively.

  You can include the results of other expressions into a string by enclosing them in ${ }, a feature known as string interpolation.

  The second way to write string literals is as an indented string, which is enclosed between pairs of double single-quotes, like so:

  ''
    This is the first line.
    This is the second line.
      This is the third line.
  ''
  

  This kind of string literal intelligently strips indentation from the start of each line. To be precise, it strips from each line a number of spaces equal to the minimal indentation of the string as a whole (disregarding the indentation of empty lines). For instance, the first and second line are indented two spaces, while the third line is indented four spaces. Thus, two spaces are stripped from each line, so the resulting string is

  "This is the first line.\nThis is the second line.\n  This is the third line.\n"
  

  Note that the whitespace and newline following the opening '' is ignored if there is no non-whitespace text on the initial line.

  Indented strings support string interpolation.

  Since ${ and '' have special meaning in indented strings, you need a way to quote them. $ can be escaped by prefixing it with '' (that is, two single quotes), i.e., ''$. '' can be escaped by prefixing it with ', i.e., '''. $ removes any special meaning from the following $. Linefeed, carriage-return and tab characters can be written as ''\n, ''\r, ''\t, and ''\ escapes any other character.

  Indented strings are primarily useful in that they allow multi-line string literals to follow the indentation of the enclosing Nix expression, and that less escaping is typically necessary for strings representing languages such as shell scripts and configuration files because '' is much less common than ". Example:

  stdenv.mkDerivation {
    ...
    postInstall =
      ''
        mkdir $out/bin $out/etc
        cp foo $out/bin
        echo "Hello World" > $out/etc/foo.conf
        ${if enableBar then "cp bar $out/bin" else ""}
      '';
    ...
  }
  

  Finally, as a convenience, URIs as defined in appendix B of RFC 2396 can be written as is, without quotes. For instance, the string "http://example.org/foo.tar.bz2" can also be written as http://example.org/foo.tar.bz2.

• Number

  Numbers, which can be integers (like 123) or floating point (like 123.43 or .27e13).

  See arithmetic and comparison operators for semantics.

• Path

  Paths, e.g., /bin/sh or ./builder.sh. A path must contain at least one slash to be recognised as such. For instance, builder.sh is not a path: it's parsed as an expression that selects the attribute sh from the variable builder. If the file name is relative, i.e., if it does not begin with a slash, it is made absolute at parse time relative to the directory of the Nix expression that contained it. For instance, if a Nix expression in /foo/bar/bla.nix refers to ../xyzzy/fnord.nix, the absolute path is /foo/xyzzy/fnord.nix.

  If the first component of a path is a ~, it is interpreted as if the rest of the path were relative to the user's home directory. e.g. ~/foo would be equivalent to /home/edolstra/foo for a user whose home directory is /home/edolstra.

  Paths can also be specified between angle brackets, e.g. <nixpkgs>. This means that the directories listed in the environment variable NIX_PATH will be searched for the given file or directory name.

  When an interpolated string evaluates to a path, the path is first copied into the Nix store and the resulting string is the store path of the newly created store object.

  For instance, evaluating "${./foo.txt}" will cause foo.txt in the current directory to be copied into the Nix store and result in the string "/nix/store/<hash>-foo.txt".

  Note that the Nix language assumes that all input files will remain unchanged while evaluating a Nix expression. For example, assume you used a file path in an interpolated string during a nix repl session. Later in the same session, after having changed the file contents, evaluating the interpolated string with the file path again might not return a new store path, since Nix might not re-read the file contents.

  Paths themselves, except those in angle brackets (< >), support string interpolation.

  At least one slash (/) must appear before any interpolated expression for the result to be recognized as a path.

  a.${foo}/b.${bar} is a syntactically valid division operation. ./a.${foo}/b.${bar} is a path.

• Boolean

  Booleans with values true and false.

• Null

  The null value, denoted as null.

List

Lists are formed by enclosing a whitespace-separated list of values between square brackets. For example,

[ 123 ./foo.nix "abc" (f { x = y; }) ]

defines a list of four elements, the last being the result of a call to the function f. Note that function calls have to be enclosed in parentheses. If they had been omitted, e.g.,

[ 123 ./foo.nix "abc" f { x = y; } ]

the result would be a list of five elements, the fourth one being a function and the fifth being a set.

Note that lists are only lazy in values, and they are strict in length.

Attribute Set

An attribute set is a collection of name-value-pairs (called attributes) enclosed in curly brackets ({ }).

Names and values are separated by an equal sign (=). Each value is an arbitrary expression terminated by a semicolon (;).

Attributes can appear in any order. An attribute name may only occur once.

Example:

{
  x = 123;
  text = "Hello";
  y = f { bla = 456; };
}

This defines a set with attributes named x, text, y.

Attributes can be selected from a set using the . operator. For instance,

{ a = "Foo"; b = "Bar"; }.a

evaluates to "Foo". It is possible to provide a default value in an attribute selection using the or keyword. For example,

{ a = "Foo"; b = "Bar"; }.c or "Xyzzy"

will evaluate to "Xyzzy" because there is no c attribute in the set.

You can use arbitrary double-quoted strings as attribute names:

{ "$!@#?" = 123; }."$!@#?"

let bar = "bar";
{ "foo ${bar}" = 123; }."foo ${bar}"

Both will evaluate to 123.

Attribute names support string interpolation:

let bar = "foo"; in
{ foo = 123; }.${bar}

let bar = "foo"; in
{ ${bar} = 123; }.foo

Both will evaluate to 123.

In the special case where an attribute name inside of a set declaration evaluates to null (which is normally an error, as null cannot be coerced to a string), that attribute is simply not added to the set:

{ ${if foo then "bar" else null} = true; }

This will evaluate to {} if foo evaluates to false.

A set that has a __functor attribute whose value is callable (i.e. is itself a function or a set with a __functor attribute whose value is callable) can be applied as if it were a function, with the set itself passed in first , e.g.,

let add = { __functor = self: x: x + self.x; };
    inc = add // { x = 1; };
in inc 1

evaluates to 2. This can be used to attach metadata to a function without the caller needing to treat it specially, or to implement a form of object-oriented programming, for example.

Language Constructs

Recursive sets

Recursive sets are just normal sets, but the attributes can refer to each other. For example,

rec {
  x = y;
  y = 123;
}.x

evaluates to 123. Note that without rec the binding x = y; would refer to the variable y in the surrounding scope, if one exists, and would be invalid if no such variable exists. That is, in a normal (non-recursive) set, attributes are not added to the lexical scope; in a recursive set, they are.

Recursive sets of course introduce the danger of infinite recursion. For example, the expression

rec {
  x = y;
  y = x;
}.x

will crash with an infinite recursion encountered error message.

Let-expressions

A let-expression allows you to define local variables for an expression. For instance,

let
  x = "foo";
  y = "bar";
in x + y

evaluates to "foobar".

Inheriting attributes

When defining a set or in a let-expression it is often convenient to copy variables from the surrounding lexical scope (e.g., when you want to propagate attributes). This can be shortened using the inherit keyword. For instance,

let x = 123; in
{ inherit x;
  y = 456;
}

is equivalent to

let x = 123; in
{ x = x;
  y = 456;
}

and both evaluate to { x = 123; y = 456; }. (Note that this works because x is added to the lexical scope by the let construct.) It is also possible to inherit attributes from another set. For instance, in this fragment from all-packages.nix,

graphviz = (import ../tools/graphics/graphviz) {
  inherit fetchurl stdenv libpng libjpeg expat x11 yacc;
  inherit (xlibs) libXaw;
};

xlibs = {
  libX11 = ...;
  libXaw = ...;
  ...
}

libpng = ...;
libjpg = ...;
...

the set used in the function call to the function defined in ../tools/graphics/graphviz inherits a number of variables from the surrounding scope (fetchurl ... yacc), but also inherits libXaw (the X Athena Widgets) from the xlibs (X11 client-side libraries) set.

Summarizing the fragment

...
inherit x y z;
inherit (src-set) a b c;
...

is equivalent to

...
x = x; y = y; z = z;
a = src-set.a; b = src-set.b; c = src-set.c;
...

when used while defining local variables in a let-expression or while defining a set.

Functions

Functions have the following form:

pattern: body

The pattern specifies what the argument of the function must look like, and binds variables in the body to (parts of) the argument. There are three kinds of patterns:

• If a pattern is a single identifier, then the function matches any argument. Example:

  let negate = x: !x;
      concat = x: y: x + y;
  in if negate true then concat "foo" "bar" else ""
  

  Note that concat is a function that takes one argument and returns a function that takes another argument. This allows partial parameterisation (i.e., only filling some of the arguments of a function); e.g.,

  map (concat "foo") [ "bar" "bla" "abc" ]
  

  evaluates to [ "foobar" "foobla" "fooabc" ].

• A set pattern of the form { name1, name2, …, nameN } matches a set containing the listed attributes, and binds the values of those attributes to variables in the function body. For example, the function

  { x, y, z }: z + y + x
  

  can only be called with a set containing exactly the attributes x, y and z. No other attributes are allowed. If you want to allow additional arguments, you can use an ellipsis (...):

  { x, y, z, ... }: z + y + x
  

  This works on any set that contains at least the three named attributes.

  It is possible to provide default values for attributes, in which case they are allowed to be missing. A default value is specified by writing name ? e, where e is an arbitrary expression. For example,

  { x, y ? "foo", z ? "bar" }: z + y + x
  

  specifies a function that only requires an attribute named x, but optionally accepts y and z.

• An @-pattern provides a means of referring to the whole value being matched:

  args@{ x, y, z, ... }: z + y + x + args.a
  

  but can also be written as:

  { x, y, z, ... } @ args: z + y + x + args.a
  

  Here args is bound to the entire argument, which is further matched against the pattern { x, y, z, ... }. @-pattern makes mainly sense with an ellipsis(...) as you can access attribute names as a, using args.a, which was given as an additional attribute to the function.

  Warning

  The args@ expression is bound to the argument passed to the function which means that attributes with defaults that aren't explicitly specified in the function call won't cause an evaluation error, but won't exist in args.

  For instance

  let
    function = args@{ a ? 23, ... }: args;
  in
    function {}
  

  will evaluate to an empty attribute set.

Note that functions do not have names. If you want to give them a name, you can bind them to an attribute, e.g.,

let concat = { x, y }: x + y;
in concat { x = "foo"; y = "bar"; }

Conditionals

Conditionals look like this:

if e1 then e2 else e3

where e1 is an expression that should evaluate to a Boolean value (true or false).

Assertions

Assertions are generally used to check that certain requirements on or between features and dependencies hold. They look like this:

assert e1; e2

where e1 is an expression that should evaluate to a Boolean value. If it evaluates to true, e2 is returned; otherwise expression evaluation is aborted and a backtrace is printed.

Here is a Nix expression for the Subversion package that shows how assertions can be used:.

{ localServer ? false
, httpServer ? false
, sslSupport ? false
, pythonBindings ? false
, javaSwigBindings ? false
, javahlBindings ? false
, stdenv, fetchurl
, openssl ? null, httpd ? null, db4 ? null, expat, swig ? null, j2sdk ? null
}:

assert localServer -> db4 != null; ①
assert httpServer -> httpd != null && httpd.expat == expat; ②
assert sslSupport -> openssl != null && (httpServer -> httpd.openssl == openssl); ③
assert pythonBindings -> swig != null && swig.pythonSupport;
assert javaSwigBindings -> swig != null && swig.javaSupport;
assert javahlBindings -> j2sdk != null;

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "subversion-1.1.1";
  ...
  openssl = if sslSupport then openssl else null; ④
  ...
}

The points of interest are:

1. This assertion states that if Subversion is to have support for local repositories, then Berkeley DB is needed. So if the Subversion function is called with the localServer argument set to true but the db4 argument set to null, then the evaluation fails.

   Note that -> is the logical implication Boolean operation.

2. This is a more subtle condition: if Subversion is built with Apache (httpServer) support, then the Expat library (an XML library) used by Subversion should be same as the one used by Apache. This is because in this configuration Subversion code ends up being linked with Apache code, and if the Expat libraries do not match, a build- or runtime link error or incompatibility might occur.

3. This assertion says that in order for Subversion to have SSL support (so that it can access https URLs), an OpenSSL library must be passed. Additionally, it says that if Apache support is enabled, then Apache's OpenSSL should match Subversion's. (Note that if Apache support is not enabled, we don't care about Apache's OpenSSL.)

4. The conditional here is not really related to assertions, but is worth pointing out: it ensures that if SSL support is disabled, then the Subversion derivation is not dependent on OpenSSL, even if a non-null value was passed. This prevents an unnecessary rebuild of Subversion if OpenSSL changes.

With-expressions

A with-expression,

with e1; e2

introduces the set e1 into the lexical scope of the expression e2. For instance,

let as = { x = "foo"; y = "bar"; };
in with as; x + y

evaluates to "foobar" since the with adds the x and y attributes of as to the lexical scope in the expression x + y. The most common use of with is in conjunction with the import function. E.g.,

with (import ./definitions.nix); ...

makes all attributes defined in the file definitions.nix available as if they were defined locally in a let-expression.

The bindings introduced by with do not shadow bindings introduced by other means, e.g.

let a = 3; in with { a = 1; }; let a = 4; in with { a = 2; }; ...

establishes the same scope as

let a = 1; in let a = 2; in let a = 3; in let a = 4; in ...

Comments

Comments can be single-line, started with a # character, or inline/multi-line, enclosed within /* ... */.

String interpolation

String interpolation is a language feature where a string, path, or attribute name can contain expressions enclosed in ${ } (dollar-sign with curly brackets).

Such a string is an interpolated string, and an expression inside is an interpolated expression.

Interpolated expressions must evaluate to one of the following:

• a string
• a path
• a derivation

Examples

String

Rather than writing

"--with-freetype2-library=" + freetype + "/lib"

(where freetype is a derivation), you can instead write

"--with-freetype2-library=${freetype}/lib"

The latter is automatically translated to the former.

A more complicated example (from the Nix expression for Qt):

configureFlags = "
  -system-zlib -system-libpng -system-libjpeg
  ${if openglSupport then "-dlopen-opengl
    -L${mesa}/lib -I${mesa}/include
    -L${libXmu}/lib -I${libXmu}/include" else ""}
  ${if threadSupport then "-thread" else "-no-thread"}
";

Note that Nix expressions and strings can be arbitrarily nested; in this case the outer string contains various interpolated expressions that themselves contain strings (e.g., "-thread"), some of which in turn contain interpolated expressions (e.g., ${mesa}).

Path

Rather than writing

./. + "/" + foo + "-" + bar + ".nix"

or

./. + "/${foo}-${bar}.nix"

you can instead write

./${foo}-${bar}.nix

Attribute name

Attribute names can be created dynamically with string interpolation:

let name = "foo"; in
{
  ${name} = "bar";
}

{ foo = "bar"; }

Operators

Attribute selection

Select the attribute denoted by attribute path attrpath from attribute set attrset. If the attribute doesn’t exist, return value if provided, otherwise abort evaluation.

An attribute path is a dot-separated list of attribute names. An attribute name can be an identifier or a string.

attrpath = name [ . name ]... name = identifier | string identifier ~ [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_'-]*

Has attribute

attrset ? attrpath

Test whether attribute set attrset contains the attribute denoted by attrpath. The result is a Boolean value.

Arithmetic

Numbers are type-compatible: Pure integer operations will always return integers, whereas any operation involving at least one floating point number return a floating point number.

See also Comparison and Equality.

The + operator is overloaded to also work on strings and paths.

String concatenation

string + string

Concatenate two strings and merge their string contexts.

Path concatenation

path + path

Concatenate two paths. The result is a path.

Path and string concatenation

path + string

Concatenate path with string. The result is a path.

Note

The string must not have a string context that refers to a store path.

String and path concatenation

string + path

Concatenate string with path. The result is a string.

Important

The file or directory at path must exist and is copied to the store. The path appears in the result as the corresponding store path.

Update

attrset1 + attrset2

Update attribute set attrset1 with names and values from attrset2.

The returned attribute set will have of all the attributes in e1 and e2. If an attribute name is present in both, the attribute value from the former is taken.

Comparison

Comparison is

• arithmetic for numbers
• lexicographic for strings and paths
• item-wise lexicographic for lists: elements at the same index in both lists are compared according to their type and skipped if they are equal.

All comparison operators are implemented in terms of <, and the following equivalencies hold:

Equality

• Attribute sets and lists are compared recursively, and therefore are fully evaluated.
• Comparison of functions always returns false.
• Numbers are type-compatible, see arithmetic operators.
• Floating point numbers only differ up to a limited precision.

Logical implication

Equivalent to !b1 || b2.

Derivations

The most important built-in function is derivation, which is used to describe a single derivation (a build task). It takes as input a set, the attributes of which specify the inputs of the build.

• There must be an attribute named system whose value must be a string specifying a Nix system type, such as "i686-linux" or "x86_64-darwin". (To figure out your system type, run nix -vv --version.) The build can only be performed on a machine and operating system matching the system type. (Nix can automatically forward builds for other platforms by forwarding them to other machines.)

• There must be an attribute named name whose value must be a string. This is used as a symbolic name for the package by nix-env, and it is appended to the output paths of the derivation.

• There must be an attribute named builder that identifies the program that is executed to perform the build. It can be either a derivation or a source (a local file reference, e.g., ./builder.sh).

• Every attribute is passed as an environment variable to the builder. Attribute values are translated to environment variables as follows:

  • Strings and numbers are just passed verbatim.

  • A path (e.g., ../foo/sources.tar) causes the referenced file to be copied to the store; its location in the store is put in the environment variable. The idea is that all sources should reside in the Nix store, since all inputs to a derivation should reside in the Nix store.

  • A derivation causes that derivation to be built prior to the present derivation; its default output path is put in the environment variable.

  • Lists of the previous types are also allowed. They are simply concatenated, separated by spaces.

  • true is passed as the string 1, false and null are passed as an empty string.

• The optional attribute args specifies command-line arguments to be passed to the builder. It should be a list.

• The optional attribute outputs specifies a list of symbolic outputs of the derivation. By default, a derivation produces a single output path, denoted as out. However, derivations can produce multiple output paths. This is useful because it allows outputs to be downloaded or garbage-collected separately. For instance, imagine a library package that provides a dynamic library, header files, and documentation. A program that links against the library doesn’t need the header files and documentation at runtime, and it doesn’t need the documentation at build time. Thus, the library package could specify:

  outputs = [ "lib" "headers" "doc" ];
  

  This will cause Nix to pass environment variables lib, headers and doc to the builder containing the intended store paths of each output. The builder would typically do something like

  ./configure \
    --libdir=$lib/lib \
    --includedir=$headers/include \
    --docdir=$doc/share/doc
  

  for an Autoconf-style package. You can refer to each output of a derivation by selecting it as an attribute, e.g.

  buildInputs = [ pkg.lib pkg.headers ];
  

  The first element of outputs determines the default output. Thus, you could also write

  buildInputs = [ pkg pkg.headers ];
  

  since pkg is equivalent to pkg.lib.

The function mkDerivation in the Nixpkgs standard environment is a wrapper around derivation that adds a default value for system and always uses Bash as the builder, to which the supplied builder is passed as a command-line argument. See the Nixpkgs manual for details.

The builder is executed as follows:

• A temporary directory is created under the directory specified by TMPDIR (default /tmp) where the build will take place. The current directory is changed to this directory.

• The environment is cleared and set to the derivation attributes, as specified above.

• In addition, the following variables are set:

  • NIX_BUILD_TOP contains the path of the temporary directory for this build.

  • Also, TMPDIR, TEMPDIR, TMP, TEMP are set to point to the temporary directory. This is to prevent the builder from accidentally writing temporary files anywhere else. Doing so might cause interference by other processes.

  • PATH is set to /path-not-set to prevent shells from initialising it to their built-in default value.

  • HOME is set to /homeless-shelter to prevent programs from using /etc/passwd or the like to find the user's home directory, which could cause impurity. Usually, when HOME is set, it is used as the location of the home directory, even if it points to a non-existent path.

  • NIX_STORE is set to the path of the top-level Nix store directory (typically, /nix/store).

  • For each output declared in outputs, the corresponding environment variable is set to point to the intended path in the Nix store for that output. Each output path is a concatenation of the cryptographic hash of all build inputs, the name attribute and the output name. (The output name is omitted if it’s out.)

• If an output path already exists, it is removed. Also, locks are acquired to prevent multiple Nix instances from performing the same build at the same time.

• A log of the combined standard output and error is written to /nix/var/log/nix.

• The builder is executed with the arguments specified by the attribute args. If it exits with exit code 0, it is considered to have succeeded.

• The temporary directory is removed (unless the -K option was specified).

• If the build was successful, Nix scans each output path for references to input paths by looking for the hash parts of the input paths. Since these are potential runtime dependencies, Nix registers them as dependencies of the output paths.

• After the build, Nix sets the last-modified timestamp on all files in the build result to 1 (00:00:01 1/1/1970 UTC), sets the group to the default group, and sets the mode of the file to 0444 or 0555 (i.e., read-only, with execute permission enabled if the file was originally executable). Note that possible setuid and setgid bits are cleared. Setuid and setgid programs are not currently supported by Nix. This is because the Nix archives used in deployment have no concept of ownership information, and because it makes the build result dependent on the user performing the build.

Advanced Attributes

Derivations can declare some infrequently used optional attributes.

• allowedReferences
  The optional attribute allowedReferences specifies a list of legal references (dependencies) of the output of the builder. For example,

  allowedReferences = [];
  

  enforces that the output of a derivation cannot have any runtime dependencies on its inputs. To allow an output to have a runtime dependency on itself, use "out" as a list item. This is used in NixOS to check that generated files such as initial ramdisks for booting Linux don’t have accidental dependencies on other paths in the Nix store.

• allowedRequisites
  This attribute is similar to allowedReferences, but it specifies the legal requisites of the whole closure, so all the dependencies recursively. For example,

  allowedRequisites = [ foobar ];
  

  enforces that the output of a derivation cannot have any other runtime dependency than foobar, and in addition it enforces that foobar itself doesn't introduce any other dependency itself.

• disallowedReferences
  The optional attribute disallowedReferences specifies a list of illegal references (dependencies) of the output of the builder. For example,

  disallowedReferences = [ foo ];
  

  enforces that the output of a derivation cannot have a direct runtime dependencies on the derivation foo.

• disallowedRequisites
  This attribute is similar to disallowedReferences, but it specifies illegal requisites for the whole closure, so all the dependencies recursively. For example,

  disallowedRequisites = [ foobar ];
  

  enforces that the output of a derivation cannot have any runtime dependency on foobar or any other derivation depending recursively on foobar.

• exportReferencesGraph
  This attribute allows builders access to the references graph of their inputs. The attribute is a list of inputs in the Nix store whose references graph the builder needs to know. The value of this attribute should be a list of pairs [ name1 path1 name2 path2 ... ]. The references graph of each pathN will be stored in a text file nameN in the temporary build directory. The text files have the format used by nix-store --register-validity (with the deriver fields left empty). For example, when the following derivation is built:

  derivation {
    ...
    exportReferencesGraph = [ "libfoo-graph" libfoo ];
  };
  

  the references graph of libfoo is placed in the file libfoo-graph in the temporary build directory.

  exportReferencesGraph is useful for builders that want to do something with the closure of a store path. Examples include the builders in NixOS that generate the initial ramdisk for booting Linux (a cpio archive containing the closure of the boot script) and the ISO-9660 image for the installation CD (which is populated with a Nix store containing the closure of a bootable NixOS configuration).

• impureEnvVars
  This attribute allows you to specify a list of environment variables that should be passed from the environment of the calling user to the builder. Usually, the environment is cleared completely when the builder is executed, but with this attribute you can allow specific environment variables to be passed unmodified. For example, fetchurl in Nixpkgs has the line

  impureEnvVars = [ "http_proxy" "https_proxy" ... ];
  

  to make it use the proxy server configuration specified by the user in the environment variables http_proxy and friends.

  This attribute is only allowed in fixed-output derivations (see below), where impurities such as these are okay since (the hash of) the output is known in advance. It is ignored for all other derivations.

  Warning

  impureEnvVars implementation takes environment variables from the current builder process. When a daemon is building its environmental variables are used. Without the daemon, the environmental variables come from the environment of the nix-build.

• outputHash; outputHashAlgo; outputHashMode
  These attributes declare that the derivation is a so-called fixed-output derivation, which means that a cryptographic hash of the output is already known in advance. When the build of a fixed-output derivation finishes, Nix computes the cryptographic hash of the output and compares it to the hash declared with these attributes. If there is a mismatch, the build fails.

  The rationale for fixed-output derivations is derivations such as those produced by the fetchurl function. This function downloads a file from a given URL. To ensure that the downloaded file has not been modified, the caller must also specify a cryptographic hash of the file. For example,

  fetchurl {
    url = "http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.1.1.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "1md7jsfd8pa45z73bz1kszpp01yw6x5ljkjk2hx7wl800any6465";
  }
  

  It sometimes happens that the URL of the file changes, e.g., because servers are reorganised or no longer available. We then must update the call to fetchurl, e.g.,

  fetchurl {
    url = "ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.1.1.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "1md7jsfd8pa45z73bz1kszpp01yw6x5ljkjk2hx7wl800any6465";
  }
  

  If a fetchurl derivation was treated like a normal derivation, the output paths of the derivation and all derivations depending on it would change. For instance, if we were to change the URL of the Glibc source distribution in Nixpkgs (a package on which almost all other packages depend) massive rebuilds would be needed. This is unfortunate for a change which we know cannot have a real effect as it propagates upwards through the dependency graph.

  For fixed-output derivations, on the other hand, the name of the output path only depends on the outputHash* and name attributes, while all other attributes are ignored for the purpose of computing the output path. (The name attribute is included because it is part of the path.)

  As an example, here is the (simplified) Nix expression for fetchurl:

  { stdenv, curl }: # The curl program is used for downloading.
  
  { url, sha256 }:
  
  stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = baseNameOf (toString url);
    builder = ./builder.sh;
    buildInputs = [ curl ];
  
    # This is a fixed-output derivation; the output must be a regular
    # file with SHA256 hash sha256.
    outputHashMode = "flat";
    outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
    outputHash = sha256;
  
    inherit url;
  }
  

  The outputHashAlgo attribute specifies the hash algorithm used to compute the hash. It can currently be "sha1", "sha256" or "sha512".

  The outputHashMode attribute determines how the hash is computed. It must be one of the following two values:

  • "flat"
    The output must be a non-executable regular file. If it isn’t, the build fails. The hash is simply computed over the contents of that file (so it’s equal to what Unix commands like sha256sum or sha1sum produce).

    This is the default.

  • "recursive"
    The hash is computed over the NAR archive dump of the output (i.e., the result of nix-store --dump). In this case, the output can be anything, including a directory tree.

  The outputHash attribute, finally, must be a string containing the hash in either hexadecimal or base-32 notation. (See the nix-hash command for information about converting to and from base-32 notation.)

• __contentAddressed If this experimental attribute is set to true, then the derivation outputs will be stored in a content-addressed location rather than the traditional input-addressed one. This only has an effect if the ca-derivation experimental feature is enabled.

  Setting this attribute also requires setting outputHashMode and outputHashAlgo like for fixed-output derivations (see above).

• passAsFile
  A list of names of attributes that should be passed via files rather than environment variables. For example, if you have

  passAsFile = ["big"];
  big = "a very long string";
  

  then when the builder runs, the environment variable bigPath will contain the absolute path to a temporary file containing a very long string. That is, for any attribute x listed in passAsFile, Nix will pass an environment variable xPath holding the path of the file containing the value of attribute x. This is useful when you need to pass large strings to a builder, since most operating systems impose a limit on the size of the environment (typically, a few hundred kilobyte).

• preferLocalBuild
  If this attribute is set to true and distributed building is enabled, then, if possible, the derivation will be built locally instead of forwarded to a remote machine. This is appropriate for trivial builders where the cost of doing a download or remote build would exceed the cost of building locally.

• allowSubstitutes
  If this attribute is set to false, then Nix will always build this derivation; it will not try to substitute its outputs. This is useful for very trivial derivations (such as writeText in Nixpkgs) that are cheaper to build than to substitute from a binary cache.

  Note

  You need to have a builder configured which satisfies the derivation’s system attribute, since the derivation cannot be substituted. Thus it is usually a good idea to align system with builtins.currentSystem when setting allowSubstitutes to false. For most trivial derivations this should be the case.

Built-in Constants

Here are the constants built into the Nix expression evaluator:

• builtins
  The set builtins contains all the built-in functions and values. You can use builtins to test for the availability of features in the Nix installation, e.g.,

  if builtins ? getEnv then builtins.getEnv "PATH" else ""
  

  This allows a Nix expression to fall back gracefully on older Nix installations that don’t have the desired built-in function.

• builtins.currentSystem
  The built-in value currentSystem evaluates to the Nix platform identifier for the Nix installation on which the expression is being evaluated, such as "i686-linux" or "x86_64-darwin".

Built-in Functions

This section lists the functions built into the Nix expression evaluator. (The built-in function derivation is discussed above.) Some built-ins, such as derivation, are always in scope of every Nix expression; you can just access them right away. But to prevent polluting the namespace too much, most built-ins are not in scope. Instead, you can access them through the builtins built-in value, which is a set that contains all built-in functions and values. For instance, derivation is also available as builtins.derivation.

derivation attrs; builtins.derivation attrs

derivation is described in its own section.

abort s

Abort Nix expression evaluation and print the error message s.

add e1 e2

Return the sum of the numbers e1 and e2.

all pred list

Return true if the function pred returns true for all elements of list, and false otherwise.

any pred list

Return true if the function pred returns true for at least one element of list, and false otherwise.

attrNames set

Return the names of the attributes in the set set in an alphabetically sorted list. For instance, builtins.attrNames { y = 1; x = "foo"; } evaluates to [ "x" "y" ].

attrValues set

Return the values of the attributes in the set set in the order corresponding to the sorted attribute names.

baseNameOf s

Return the base name of the string s, that is, everything following the final slash in the string. This is similar to the GNU basename command.

bitAnd e1 e2

Return the bitwise AND of the integers e1 and e2.

bitOr e1 e2

Return the bitwise OR of the integers e1 and e2.

bitXor e1 e2

Return the bitwise XOR of the integers e1 and e2.

break v

In debug mode (enabled using --debugger), pause Nix expression evaluation and enter the REPL. Otherwise, return the argument v.

catAttrs attr list

Collect each attribute named attr from a list of attribute sets. Attrsets that don't contain the named attribute are ignored. For example,

builtins.catAttrs "a" [{a = 1;} {b = 0;} {a = 2;}]

evaluates to [1 2].

ceil double

Converts an IEEE-754 double-precision floating-point number (double) to the next higher integer.

If the datatype is neither an integer nor a "float", an evaluation error will be thrown.

compareVersions s1 s2

Compare two strings representing versions and return -1 if version s1 is older than version s2, 0 if they are the same, and 1 if s1 is newer than s2. The version comparison algorithm is the same as the one used by nix-env -u.

concatLists lists

Concatenate a list of lists into a single list.

concatMap f list

This function is equivalent to builtins.concatLists (map f list) but is more efficient.

concatStringsSep separator list

Concatenate a list of strings with a separator between each element, e.g. concatStringsSep "/" ["usr" "local" "bin"] == "usr/local/bin".

deepSeq e1 e2

This is like seq e1 e2, except that e1 is evaluated deeply: if it’s a list or set, its elements or attributes are also evaluated recursively.

dirOf s

Return the directory part of the string s, that is, everything before the final slash in the string. This is similar to the GNU dirname command.

div e1 e2

Return the quotient of the numbers e1 and e2.

elem x xs

Return true if a value equal to x occurs in the list xs, and false otherwise.

elemAt xs n

Return element n from the list xs. Elements are counted starting from 0. A fatal error occurs if the index is out of bounds.

fetchClosure args

Fetch a Nix store closure from a binary cache, rewriting it into content-addressed form. For example,

builtins.fetchClosure {
  fromStore = "https://cache.nixos.org";
  fromPath = /nix/store/r2jd6ygnmirm2g803mksqqjm4y39yi6i-git-2.33.1;
  toPath = /nix/store/ldbhlwhh39wha58rm61bkiiwm6j7211j-git-2.33.1;
}

fetches /nix/store/r2jd... from the specified binary cache, and rewrites it into the content-addressed store path /nix/store/ldbh....

If fromPath is already content-addressed, or if you are allowing impure evaluation (--impure), then toPath may be omitted.

To find out the correct value for toPath given a fromPath, you can use nix store make-content-addressed:

# nix store make-content-addressed --from https://cache.nixos.org /nix/store/r2jd6ygnmirm2g803mksqqjm4y39yi6i-git-2.33.1
rewrote '/nix/store/r2jd6ygnmirm2g803mksqqjm4y39yi6i-git-2.33.1' to '/nix/store/ldbhlwhh39wha58rm61bkiiwm6j7211j-git-2.33.1'

This function is similar to builtins.storePath in that it allows you to use a previously built store path in a Nix expression. However, it is more reproducible because it requires specifying a binary cache from which the path can be fetched. Also, requiring a content-addressed final store path avoids the need for users to configure binary cache public keys.

This function is only available if you enable the experimental feature fetch-closure.

fetchGit args

Fetch a path from git. args can be a URL, in which case the HEAD of the repo at that URL is fetched. Otherwise, it can be an attribute with the following attributes (all except url optional):

• url
  The URL of the repo.

• name
  The name of the directory the repo should be exported to in the store. Defaults to the basename of the URL.

• rev
  The git revision to fetch. Defaults to the tip of ref.

• ref
  The git ref to look for the requested revision under. This is often a branch or tag name. Defaults to HEAD.

  By default, the ref value is prefixed with refs/heads/. As of Nix 2.3.0 Nix will not prefix refs/heads/ if ref starts with refs/.

• submodules
  A Boolean parameter that specifies whether submodules should be checked out. Defaults to false.

• shallow
  A Boolean parameter that specifies whether fetching a shallow clone is allowed. Defaults to false.

• allRefs
  Whether to fetch all refs of the repository. With this argument being true, it's possible to load a rev from any ref (by default only revs from the specified ref are supported).

Here are some examples of how to use fetchGit.

• To fetch a private repository over SSH:

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "git@github.com:my-secret/repository.git";
    ref = "master";
    rev = "adab8b916a45068c044658c4158d81878f9ed1c3";
  }
  

• To fetch an arbitrary reference:

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nix.git";
    ref = "refs/heads/0.5-release";
  }
  

• If the revision you're looking for is in the default branch of the git repository you don't strictly need to specify the branch name in the ref attribute.

  However, if the revision you're looking for is in a future branch for the non-default branch you will need to specify the the ref attribute as well.

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://github.com/nixos/nix.git";
    rev = "841fcbd04755c7a2865c51c1e2d3b045976b7452";
    ref = "1.11-maintenance";
  }
  

  Note

  It is nice to always specify the branch which a revision belongs to. Without the branch being specified, the fetcher might fail if the default branch changes. Additionally, it can be confusing to try a commit from a non-default branch and see the fetch fail. If the branch is specified the fault is much more obvious.

• If the revision you're looking for is in the default branch of the git repository you may omit the ref attribute.

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://github.com/nixos/nix.git";
    rev = "841fcbd04755c7a2865c51c1e2d3b045976b7452";
  }
  

• To fetch a specific tag:

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://github.com/nixos/nix.git";
    ref = "refs/tags/1.9";
  }
  

• To fetch the latest version of a remote branch:

  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "ssh://git@github.com/nixos/nix.git";
    ref = "master";
  }
  

  Note

  Nix will refetch the branch in accordance with the option tarball-ttl.

  Note

  This behavior is disabled in Pure evaluation mode.

fetchTarball args

Download the specified URL, unpack it and return the path of the unpacked tree. The file must be a tape archive (.tar) compressed with gzip, bzip2 or xz. The top-level path component of the files in the tarball is removed, so it is best if the tarball contains a single directory at top level. The typical use of the function is to obtain external Nix expression dependencies, such as a particular version of Nixpkgs, e.g.

with import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz) {};

stdenv.mkDerivation { … }

The fetched tarball is cached for a certain amount of time (1 hour by default) in ~/.cache/nix/tarballs/. You can change the cache timeout either on the command line with --tarball-ttl number-of-seconds or in the Nix configuration file by adding the line tarball-ttl = number-of-seconds.

Note that when obtaining the hash with nix-prefetch-url the option --unpack is required.

This function can also verify the contents against a hash. In that case, the function takes a set instead of a URL. The set requires the attribute url and the attribute sha256, e.g.

with import (fetchTarball {
  url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz";
  sha256 = "1jppksrfvbk5ypiqdz4cddxdl8z6zyzdb2srq8fcffr327ld5jj2";
}) {};

stdenv.mkDerivation { … }

This function is not available if restricted evaluation mode is enabled.

fetchurl url

Download the specified URL and return the path of the downloaded file. This function is not available if restricted evaluation mode is enabled.

filter f list

Return a list consisting of the elements of list for which the function f returns true.

filterSource e1 e2

Warning

filterSource should not be used to filter store paths. Since filterSource uses the name of the input directory while naming the output directory, doing so will produce a directory name in the form of <hash2>-<hash>-<name>, where <hash>-<name> is the name of the input directory. Since <hash> depends on the unfiltered directory, the name of the output directory will indirectly depend on files that are filtered out by the function. This will trigger a rebuild even when a filtered out file is changed. Use builtins.path instead, which allows specifying the name of the output directory.

This function allows you to copy sources into the Nix store while filtering certain files. For instance, suppose that you want to use the directory source-dir as an input to a Nix expression, e.g.

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  ...
  src = ./source-dir;
}

However, if source-dir is a Subversion working copy, then all those annoying .svn subdirectories will also be copied to the store. Worse, the contents of those directories may change a lot, causing lots of spurious rebuilds. With filterSource you can filter out the .svn directories:

src = builtins.filterSource
  (path: type: type != "directory" || baseNameOf path != ".svn")
  ./source-dir;

Thus, the first argument e1 must be a predicate function that is called for each regular file, directory or symlink in the source tree e2. If the function returns true, the file is copied to the Nix store, otherwise it is omitted. The function is called with two arguments. The first is the full path of the file. The second is a string that identifies the type of the file, which is either "regular", "directory", "symlink" or "unknown" (for other kinds of files such as device nodes or fifos — but note that those cannot be copied to the Nix store, so if the predicate returns true for them, the copy will fail). If you exclude a directory, the entire corresponding subtree of e2 will be excluded.

floor double

Converts an IEEE-754 double-precision floating-point number (double) to the next lower integer.

If the datatype is neither an integer nor a "float", an evaluation error will be thrown.

foldl' op nul list

Reduce a list by applying a binary operator, from left to right, e.g. foldl' op nul [x0 x1 x2 ...] = op (op (op nul x0) x1) x2) .... The operator is applied strictly, i.e., its arguments are evaluated first. For example, foldl' (x: y: x + y) 0 [1 2 3] evaluates to 6.

fromJSON e

Convert a JSON string to a Nix value. For example,

builtins.fromJSON ''{"x": [1, 2, 3], "y": null}''

returns the value { x = [ 1 2 3 ]; y = null; }.

functionArgs f

Return a set containing the names of the formal arguments expected by the function f. The value of each attribute is a Boolean denoting whether the corresponding argument has a default value. For instance, functionArgs ({ x, y ? 123}: ...) = { x = false; y = true; }.

"Formal argument" here refers to the attributes pattern-matched by the function. Plain lambdas are not included, e.g. functionArgs (x: ...) = { }.

genList generator length

Generate list of size length, with each element i equal to the value returned by generator i. For example,

builtins.genList (x: x * x) 5

returns the list [ 0 1 4 9 16 ].

genericClosure attrset

Take an attrset with values named startSet and operator in order to return a list of attrsets by starting with the startSet, recursively applying the operator function to each element. The attrsets in the startSet and produced by the operator must each contain value named key which are comparable to each other. The result is produced by repeatedly calling the operator for each element encountered with a unique key, terminating when no new elements are produced. For example,

builtins.genericClosure {
  startSet = [ {key = 5;} ];
  operator = item: [{
    key = if (item.key / 2 ) * 2 == item.key
         then item.key / 2
         else 3 * item.key + 1;
  }];
}

evaluates to

[ { key = 5; } { key = 16; } { key = 8; } { key = 4; } { key = 2; } { key = 1; } ]

getAttr s set

getAttr returns the attribute named s from set. Evaluation aborts if the attribute doesn’t exist. This is a dynamic version of the . operator, since s is an expression rather than an identifier.

getEnv s

getEnv returns the value of the environment variable s, or an empty string if the variable doesn’t exist. This function should be used with care, as it can introduce all sorts of nasty environment dependencies in your Nix expression.

getEnv is used in Nix Packages to locate the file ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix, which contains user-local settings for Nix Packages. (That is, it does a getEnv "HOME" to locate the user’s home directory.)

getFlake args

Fetch a flake from a flake reference, and return its output attributes and some metadata. For example:

(builtins.getFlake "nix/55bc52401966fbffa525c574c14f67b00bc4fb3a").packages.x86_64-linux.nix

Unless impure evaluation is allowed (--impure), the flake reference must be "locked", e.g. contain a Git revision or content hash. An example of an unlocked usage is:

(builtins.getFlake "github:edolstra/dwarffs").rev

This function is only available if you enable the experimental feature flakes.

groupBy f list

Groups elements of list together by the string returned from the function f called on each element. It returns an attribute set where each attribute value contains the elements of list that are mapped to the same corresponding attribute name returned by f.

For example,

builtins.groupBy (builtins.substring 0 1) ["foo" "bar" "baz"]

evaluates to

{ b = [ "bar" "baz" ]; f = [ "foo" ]; }

hasAttr s set

hasAttr returns true if set has an attribute named s, and false otherwise. This is a dynamic version of the ? operator, since s is an expression rather than an identifier.

hashFile type p

Return a base-16 representation of the cryptographic hash of the file at path p. The hash algorithm specified by type must be one of "md5", "sha1", "sha256" or "sha512".

hashString type s

Return a base-16 representation of the cryptographic hash of string s. The hash algorithm specified by type must be one of "md5", "sha1", "sha256" or "sha512".

head list

Return the first element of a list; abort evaluation if the argument isn’t a list or is an empty list. You can test whether a list is empty by comparing it with [].

import path

Load, parse and return the Nix expression in the file path. If path is a directory, the file default.nix in that directory is loaded. Evaluation aborts if the file doesn’t exist or contains an incorrect Nix expression. import implements Nix’s module system: you can put any Nix expression (such as a set or a function) in a separate file, and use it from Nix expressions in other files.

Note

Unlike some languages, import is a regular function in Nix. Paths using the angle bracket syntax (e.g., import <foo>) are normal path values.

A Nix expression loaded by import must not contain any free variables (identifiers that are not defined in the Nix expression itself and are not built-in). Therefore, it cannot refer to variables that are in scope at the call site. For instance, if you have a calling expression

rec {
  x = 123;
  y = import ./foo.nix;
}

then the following foo.nix will give an error:

x + 456

since x is not in scope in foo.nix. If you want x to be available in foo.nix, you should pass it as a function argument:

rec {
  x = 123;
  y = import ./foo.nix x;
}

and

x: x + 456

(The function argument doesn’t have to be called x in foo.nix; any name would work.)

intersectAttrs e1 e2

Return a set consisting of the attributes in the set e2 which have the same name as some attribute in e1.

Performs in O(n log m) where n is the size of the smaller set and m the larger set's size.

isAttrs e

Return true if e evaluates to a set, and false otherwise.

isBool e

Return true if e evaluates to a bool, and false otherwise.

isFloat e

Return true if e evaluates to a float, and false otherwise.

isFunction e

Return true if e evaluates to a function, and false otherwise.

isInt e

Return true if e evaluates to an integer, and false otherwise.

isList e

Return true if e evaluates to a list, and false otherwise.

isNull e

Return true if e evaluates to null, and false otherwise.

Warning

This function is deprecated; just write e == null instead.

isPath e

Return true if e evaluates to a path, and false otherwise.

isString e

Return true if e evaluates to a string, and false otherwise.

length e

Return the length of the list e.

lessThan e1 e2

Return true if the number e1 is less than the number e2, and false otherwise. Evaluation aborts if either e1 or e2 does not evaluate to a number.

listToAttrs e

Construct a set from a list specifying the names and values of each attribute. Each element of the list should be a set consisting of a string-valued attribute name specifying the name of the attribute, and an attribute value specifying its value.

In case of duplicate occurrences of the same name, the first takes precedence.

Example:

builtins.listToAttrs
  [ { name = "foo"; value = 123; }
    { name = "bar"; value = 456; }
    { name = "bar"; value = 420; }
  ]

evaluates to

{ foo = 123; bar = 456; }

map f list

Apply the function f to each element in the list list. For example,

map (x: "foo" + x) [ "bar" "bla" "abc" ]

evaluates to [ "foobar" "foobla" "fooabc" ].

mapAttrs f attrset

Apply function f to every element of attrset. For example,

builtins.mapAttrs (name: value: value * 10) { a = 1; b = 2; }

evaluates to { a = 10; b = 20; }.

match regex str

Returns a list if the extended POSIX regular expression regex matches str precisely, otherwise returns null. Each item in the list is a regex group.

builtins.match "ab" "abc"

Evaluates to null.

builtins.match "abc" "abc"

Evaluates to [ ].

builtins.match "a(b)(c)" "abc"

Evaluates to [ "b" "c" ].

builtins.match "[[:space:]]+([[:upper:]]+)[[:space:]]+" "  FOO   "

Evaluates to [ "FOO" ].

mul e1 e2

Return the product of the numbers e1 and e2.

parseDrvName s

Split the string s into a package name and version. The package name is everything up to but not including the first dash not followed by a letter, and the version is everything following that dash. The result is returned in a set { name, version }. Thus, builtins.parseDrvName "nix-0.12pre12876" returns { name = "nix"; version = "0.12pre12876"; }.

partition pred list

Given a predicate function pred, this function returns an attrset containing a list named right, containing the elements in list for which pred returned true, and a list named wrong, containing the elements for which it returned false. For example,

builtins.partition (x: x > 10) [1 23 9 3 42]

evaluates to

{ right = [ 23 42 ]; wrong = [ 1 9 3 ]; }

path args

An enrichment of the built-in path type, based on the attributes present in args. All are optional except path:

• path
  The underlying path.

• name
  The name of the path when added to the store. This can used to reference paths that have nix-illegal characters in their names, like @.

• filter
  A function of the type expected by builtins.filterSource, with the same semantics.

• recursive
  When false, when path is added to the store it is with a flat hash, rather than a hash of the NAR serialization of the file. Thus, path must refer to a regular file, not a directory. This allows similar behavior to fetchurl. Defaults to true.

• sha256
  When provided, this is the expected hash of the file at the path. Evaluation will fail if the hash is incorrect, and providing a hash allows builtins.path to be used even when the pure-eval nix config option is on.

pathExists path

Return true if the path path exists at evaluation time, and false otherwise.

placeholder output

Return a placeholder string for the specified output that will be substituted by the corresponding output path at build time. Typical outputs would be "out", "bin" or "dev".

readDir path

Return the contents of the directory path as a set mapping directory entries to the corresponding file type. For instance, if directory A contains a regular file B and another directory C, then builtins.readDir ./A will return the set

{ B = "regular"; C = "directory"; }

The possible values for the file type are "regular", "directory", "symlink" and "unknown".

readFile path

Return the contents of the file path as a string.

removeAttrs set list

Remove the attributes listed in list from set. The attributes don’t have to exist in set. For instance,

removeAttrs { x = 1; y = 2; z = 3; } [ "a" "x" "z" ]

evaluates to { y = 2; }.

replaceStrings from to s

Given string s, replace every occurrence of the strings in from with the corresponding string in to. For example,

builtins.replaceStrings ["oo" "a"] ["a" "i"] "foobar"

evaluates to "fabir".

seq e1 e2

Evaluate e1, then evaluate and return e2. This ensures that a computation is strict in the value of e1.

sort comparator list

Return list in sorted order. It repeatedly calls the function comparator with two elements. The comparator should return true if the first element is less than the second, and false otherwise. For example,

builtins.sort builtins.lessThan [ 483 249 526 147 42 77 ]

produces the list [ 42 77 147 249 483 526 ].

This is a stable sort: it preserves the relative order of elements deemed equal by the comparator.

split regex str

Returns a list composed of non matched strings interleaved with the lists of the extended POSIX regular expression regex matches of str. Each item in the lists of matched sequences is a regex group.

builtins.split "(a)b" "abc"

Evaluates to [ "" [ "a" ] "c" ].

builtins.split "([ac])" "abc"

Evaluates to [ "" [ "a" ] "b" [ "c" ] "" ].

builtins.split "(a)|(c)" "abc"

Evaluates to [ "" [ "a" null ] "b" [ null "c" ] "" ].

builtins.split "([[:upper:]]+)" " FOO "

Evaluates to [ " " [ "FOO" ] " " ].

splitVersion s

Split a string representing a version into its components, by the same version splitting logic underlying the version comparison in nix-env -u.

storePath path

This function allows you to define a dependency on an already existing store path. For example, the derivation attribute src = builtins.storePath /nix/store/f1d18v1y…-source causes the derivation to depend on the specified path, which must exist or be substitutable. Note that this differs from a plain path (e.g. src = /nix/store/f1d18v1y…-source) in that the latter causes the path to be copied again to the Nix store, resulting in a new path (e.g. /nix/store/ld01dnzc…-source-source).

This function is not available in pure evaluation mode.

stringLength e

Return the length of the string e. If e is not a string, evaluation is aborted.

sub e1 e2

Return the difference between the numbers e1 and e2.

substring start len s

Return the substring of s from character position start (zero-based) up to but not including start + len. If start is greater than the length of the string, an empty string is returned, and if start + len lies beyond the end of the string, only the substring up to the end of the string is returned. start must be non-negative. For example,

builtins.substring 0 3 "nixos"

evaluates to "nix".

tail list

Return the second to last elements of a list; abort evaluation if the argument isn’t a list or is an empty list.

Warning

This function should generally be avoided since it's inefficient: unlike Haskell's tail, it takes O(n) time, so recursing over a list by repeatedly calling tail takes O(n^2) time.

throw s

Throw an error message s. This usually aborts Nix expression evaluation, but in nix-env -qa and other commands that try to evaluate a set of derivations to get information about those derivations, a derivation that throws an error is silently skipped (which is not the case for abort).

toFile name s

Store the string s in a file in the Nix store and return its path. The file has suffix name. This file can be used as an input to derivations. One application is to write builders “inline”. For instance, the following Nix expression combines the Nix expression for GNU Hello and its build script into one file:

{ stdenv, fetchurl, perl }:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "hello-2.1.1";

  builder = builtins.toFile "builder.sh" "
    source $stdenv/setup

    PATH=$perl/bin:$PATH

    tar xvfz $src
    cd hello-*
    ./configure --prefix=$out
    make
    make install
  ";

  src = fetchurl {
    url = "http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.1.1.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "1md7jsfd8pa45z73bz1kszpp01yw6x5ljkjk2hx7wl800any6465";
  };
  inherit perl;
}

It is even possible for one file to refer to another, e.g.,

builder = let
  configFile = builtins.toFile "foo.conf" "
    # This is some dummy configuration file.
    ...
  ";
in builtins.toFile "builder.sh" "
  source $stdenv/setup
  ...
  cp ${configFile} $out/etc/foo.conf
";

Note that ${configFile} is a string interpolation, so the result of the expression configFile (i.e., a path like /nix/store/m7p7jfny445k...-foo.conf) will be spliced into the resulting string.

It is however not allowed to have files mutually referring to each other, like so:

let
  foo = builtins.toFile "foo" "...${bar}...";
  bar = builtins.toFile "bar" "...${foo}...";
in foo

This is not allowed because it would cause a cyclic dependency in the computation of the cryptographic hashes for foo and bar.

It is also not possible to reference the result of a derivation. If you are using Nixpkgs, the writeTextFile function is able to do that.

toJSON e

Return a string containing a JSON representation of e. Strings, integers, floats, booleans, nulls and lists are mapped to their JSON equivalents. Sets (except derivations) are represented as objects. Derivations are translated to a JSON string containing the derivation’s output path. Paths are copied to the store and represented as a JSON string of the resulting store path.

toPath s

DEPRECATED. Use /. + "/path" to convert a string into an absolute path. For relative paths, use ./. + "/path".

toString e

Convert the expression e to a string. e can be:

• A string (in which case the string is returned unmodified).

• A path (e.g., toString /foo/bar yields "/foo/bar".

• A set containing { __toString = self: ...; } or { outPath = ...; }.

• An integer.

• A list, in which case the string representations of its elements are joined with spaces.

• A Boolean (false yields "", true yields "1").

• null, which yields the empty string.

toXML e

Return a string containing an XML representation of e. The main application for toXML is to communicate information with the builder in a more structured format than plain environment variables.

Here is an example where this is the case:

{ stdenv, fetchurl, libxslt, jira, uberwiki }:

stdenv.mkDerivation (rec {
  name = "web-server";

  buildInputs = [ libxslt ];

  builder = builtins.toFile "builder.sh" "
    source $stdenv/setup
    mkdir $out
    echo "$servlets" | xsltproc ${stylesheet} - > $out/server-conf.xml ①
  ";

  stylesheet = builtins.toFile "stylesheet.xsl" ②
   "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' version='1.0'>
      <xsl:template match='/'>
        <Configure>
          <xsl:for-each select='/expr/list/attrs'>
            <Call name='addWebApplication'>
              <Arg><xsl:value-of select=\"attr[@name = 'path']/string/@value\" /></Arg>
              <Arg><xsl:value-of select=\"attr[@name = 'war']/path/@value\" /></Arg>
            </Call>
          </xsl:for-each>
        </Configure>
      </xsl:template>
    </xsl:stylesheet>
  ";

  servlets = builtins.toXML [ ③
    { path = "/bugtracker"; war = jira + "/lib/atlassian-jira.war"; }
    { path = "/wiki"; war = uberwiki + "/uberwiki.war"; }
  ];
})

The builder is supposed to generate the configuration file for a Jetty servlet container. A servlet container contains a number of servlets (*.war files) each exported under a specific URI prefix. So the servlet configuration is a list of sets containing the path and war of the servlet (①). This kind of information is difficult to communicate with the normal method of passing information through an environment variable, which just concatenates everything together into a string (which might just work in this case, but wouldn’t work if fields are optional or contain lists themselves). Instead the Nix expression is converted to an XML representation with toXML, which is unambiguous and can easily be processed with the appropriate tools. For instance, in the example an XSLT stylesheet (at point ②) is applied to it (at point ①) to generate the XML configuration file for the Jetty server. The XML representation produced at point ③ by toXML is as follows:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<expr>
  <list>
    <attrs>
      <attr name="path">
        <string value="/bugtracker" />
      </attr>
      <attr name="war">
        <path value="/nix/store/d1jh9pasa7k2...-jira/lib/atlassian-jira.war" />
      </attr>
    </attrs>
    <attrs>
      <attr name="path">
        <string value="/wiki" />
      </attr>
      <attr name="war">
        <path value="/nix/store/y6423b1yi4sx...-uberwiki/uberwiki.war" />
      </attr>
    </attrs>
  </list>
</expr>

Note that we used the toFile built-in to write the builder and the stylesheet “inline” in the Nix expression. The path of the stylesheet is spliced into the builder using the syntax xsltproc ${stylesheet}.

trace e1 e2

Evaluate e1 and print its abstract syntax representation on standard error. Then return e2. This function is useful for debugging.

traceVerbose e1 e2

Evaluate e1 and print its abstract syntax representation on standard error if --trace-verbose is enabled. Then return e2. This function is useful for debugging.

tryEval e

Try to shallowly evaluate e. Return a set containing the attributes success (true if e evaluated successfully, false if an error was thrown) and value, equalling e if successful and false otherwise. tryEval will only prevent errors created by throw or assert from being thrown. Errors tryEval will not catch are for example those created by abort and type errors generated by builtins. Also note that this doesn't evaluate e deeply, so let e = { x = throw ""; }; in (builtins.tryEval e).success will be true. Using builtins.deepSeq one can get the expected result: let e = { x = throw ""; }; in (builtins.tryEval (builtins.deepSeq e e)).success will be false.

typeOf e

Return a string representing the type of the value e, namely "int", "bool", "string", "path", "null", "set", "list", "lambda" or "float".

zipAttrsWith f list

Transpose a list of attribute sets into an attribute set of lists, then apply mapAttrs.

f receives two arguments: the attribute name and a non-empty list of all values encountered for that attribute name.

The result is an attribute set where the attribute names are the union of the attribute names in each element of list. The attribute values are the return values of f.

builtins.zipAttrsWith
  (name: values: { inherit name values; })
  [ { a = "x"; } { a = "y"; b = "z"; } ]

evaluates to

{
  a = { name = "a"; values = [ "x" "y" ]; };
  b = { name = "b"; values = [ "z" ]; };
}

Remote Builds

Nix supports remote builds, where a local Nix installation can forward Nix builds to other machines. This allows multiple builds to be performed in parallel and allows Nix to perform multi-platform builds in a semi-transparent way. For instance, if you perform a build for a x86_64-darwin on an i686-linux machine, Nix can automatically forward the build to a x86_64-darwin machine, if available.

To forward a build to a remote machine, it’s required that the remote machine is accessible via SSH and that it has Nix installed. You can test whether connecting to the remote Nix instance works, e.g.

$ nix store ping --store ssh://mac

will try to connect to the machine named mac. It is possible to specify an SSH identity file as part of the remote store URI, e.g.

$ nix store ping --store ssh://mac?ssh-key=/home/alice/my-key

Since builds should be non-interactive, the key should not have a passphrase. Alternatively, you can load identities ahead of time into ssh-agent or gpg-agent.

If you get the error

bash: nix-store: command not found
error: cannot connect to 'mac'

then you need to ensure that the PATH of non-interactive login shells contains Nix.

Warning

If you are building via the Nix daemon, it is the Nix daemon user account (that is, root) that should have SSH access to the remote machine. If you can’t or don’t want to configure root to be able to access to remote machine, you can use a private Nix store instead by passing e.g. --store ~/my-nix.

The list of remote machines can be specified on the command line or in the Nix configuration file. The former is convenient for testing. For example, the following command allows you to build a derivation for x86_64-darwin on a Linux machine:

$ uname
Linux

$ nix build --impure \
  --expr '(with import <nixpkgs> { system = "x86_64-darwin"; }; runCommand "foo" {} "uname > $out")' \
  --builders 'ssh://mac x86_64-darwin'
[1/0/1 built, 0.0 MiB DL] building foo on ssh://mac

$ cat ./result
Darwin

It is possible to specify multiple builders separated by a semicolon or a newline, e.g.

  --builders 'ssh://mac x86_64-darwin ; ssh://beastie x86_64-freebsd'

Each machine specification consists of the following elements, separated by spaces. Only the first element is required. To leave a field at its default, set it to -.

1. The URI of the remote store in the format ssh://[username@]hostname, e.g. ssh://nix@mac or ssh://mac. For backward compatibility, ssh:// may be omitted. The hostname may be an alias defined in your ~/.ssh/config.

2. A comma-separated list of Nix platform type identifiers, such as x86_64-darwin. It is possible for a machine to support multiple platform types, e.g., i686-linux,x86_64-linux. If omitted, this defaults to the local platform type.

3. The SSH identity file to be used to log in to the remote machine. If omitted, SSH will use its regular identities.

4. The maximum number of builds that Nix will execute in parallel on the machine. Typically this should be equal to the number of CPU cores. For instance, the machine itchy in the example will execute up to 8 builds in parallel.

5. The “speed factor”, indicating the relative speed of the machine. If there are multiple machines of the right type, Nix will prefer the fastest, taking load into account.

6. A comma-separated list of supported features. If a derivation has the requiredSystemFeatures attribute, then Nix will only perform the derivation on a machine that has the specified features. For instance, the attribute

   requiredSystemFeatures = [ "kvm" ];
   

   will cause the build to be performed on a machine that has the kvm feature.

7. A comma-separated list of mandatory features. A machine will only be used to build a derivation if all of the machine’s mandatory features appear in the derivation’s requiredSystemFeatures attribute.

8. The (base64-encoded) public host key of the remote machine. If omitted, SSH will use its regular known-hosts file. Specifically, the field is calculated via base64 -w0 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub.

For example, the machine specification

nix@scratchy.labs.cs.uu.nl  i686-linux      /home/nix/.ssh/id_scratchy_auto        8 1 kvm
nix@itchy.labs.cs.uu.nl     i686-linux      /home/nix/.ssh/id_scratchy_auto        8 2
nix@poochie.labs.cs.uu.nl   i686-linux      /home/nix/.ssh/id_scratchy_auto        1 2 kvm benchmark

specifies several machines that can perform i686-linux builds. However, poochie will only do builds that have the attribute

requiredSystemFeatures = [ "benchmark" ];

or

requiredSystemFeatures = [ "benchmark" "kvm" ];

itchy cannot do builds that require kvm, but scratchy does support such builds. For regular builds, itchy will be preferred over scratchy because it has a higher speed factor.

Remote builders can also be configured in nix.conf, e.g.

builders = ssh://mac x86_64-darwin ; ssh://beastie x86_64-freebsd

Finally, remote builders can be configured in a separate configuration file included in builders via the syntax @file. For example,

builders = @/etc/nix/machines

causes the list of machines in /etc/nix/machines to be included. (This is the default.)

If you want the builders to use caches, you likely want to set the option builders-use-substitutes in your local nix.conf.

To build only on remote builders and disable building on the local machine, you can use the option --max-jobs 0.

Tuning Cores and Jobs

Nix has two relevant settings with regards to how your CPU cores will be utilized: cores and max-jobs. This chapter will talk about what they are, how they interact, and their configuration trade-offs.

• max-jobs
  Dictates how many separate derivations will be built at the same time. If you set this to zero, the local machine will do no builds. Nix will still substitute from binary caches, and build remotely if remote builders are configured.

• cores
  Suggests how many cores each derivation should use. Similar to make -j.

The cores setting determines the value of NIX_BUILD_CORES. NIX_BUILD_CORES is equal to cores, unless cores equals 0, in which case NIX_BUILD_CORES will be the total number of cores in the system.

The maximum number of consumed cores is a simple multiplication, max-jobs * NIX_BUILD_CORES.

The balance on how to set these two independent variables depends upon each builder's workload and hardware. Here are a few example scenarios on a machine with 24 cores:

It is up to the derivations' build script to respect host's requested cores-per-build by following the value of the NIX_BUILD_CORES environment variable.

Verifying Build Reproducibility

You can use Nix's diff-hook setting to compare build results. Note that this hook is only executed if the results differ; it is not used for determining if the results are the same.

For purposes of demonstration, we'll use the following Nix file, deterministic.nix for testing:

let
  inherit (import <nixpkgs> {}) runCommand;
in {
  stable = runCommand "stable" {} ''
    touch $out
  '';

  unstable = runCommand "unstable" {} ''
    echo $RANDOM > $out
  '';
}

Additionally, nix.conf contains:

diff-hook = /etc/nix/my-diff-hook
run-diff-hook = true

where /etc/nix/my-diff-hook is an executable file containing:

#!/bin/sh
exec >&2
echo "For derivation $3:"
/run/current-system/sw/bin/diff -r "$1" "$2"

The diff hook is executed by the same user and group who ran the build. However, the diff hook does not have write access to the store path just built.

Spot-Checking Build Determinism

Verify a path which already exists in the Nix store by passing --check to the build command.

If the build passes and is deterministic, Nix will exit with a status code of 0:

$ nix-build ./deterministic.nix -A stable
this derivation will be built:
  /nix/store/z98fasz2jqy9gs0xbvdj939p27jwda38-stable.drv
building '/nix/store/z98fasz2jqy9gs0xbvdj939p27jwda38-stable.drv'...
/nix/store/yyxlzw3vqaas7wfp04g0b1xg51f2czgq-stable

$ nix-build ./deterministic.nix -A stable --check
checking outputs of '/nix/store/z98fasz2jqy9gs0xbvdj939p27jwda38-stable.drv'...
/nix/store/yyxlzw3vqaas7wfp04g0b1xg51f2czgq-stable

If the build is not deterministic, Nix will exit with a status code of 1:

$ nix-build ./deterministic.nix -A unstable
this derivation will be built:
  /nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv
building '/nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv'...
/nix/store/krpqk0l9ib0ibi1d2w52z293zw455cap-unstable

$ nix-build ./deterministic.nix -A unstable --check
checking outputs of '/nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv'...
error: derivation '/nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv' may
not be deterministic: output '/nix/store/krpqk0l9ib0ibi1d2w52z293zw455cap-unstable' differs

In the Nix daemon's log, we will now see:

For derivation /nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv:
1c1
< 8108
---
> 30204

Using --check with --keep-failed will cause Nix to keep the second build's output in a special, .check path:

$ nix-build ./deterministic.nix -A unstable --check --keep-failed
checking outputs of '/nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv'...
note: keeping build directory '/tmp/nix-build-unstable.drv-0'
error: derivation '/nix/store/cgl13lbj1w368r5z8gywipl1ifli7dhk-unstable.drv' may
not be deterministic: output '/nix/store/krpqk0l9ib0ibi1d2w52z293zw455cap-unstable' differs
from '/nix/store/krpqk0l9ib0ibi1d2w52z293zw455cap-unstable.check'

In particular, notice the /nix/store/krpqk0l9ib0ibi1d2w52z293zw455cap-unstable.check output. Nix has copied the build results to that directory where you can examine it.

Note

Check paths are not protected against garbage collection, and this path will be deleted on the next garbage collection.

The path is guaranteed to be alive for the duration of the diff-hook's execution, but may be deleted any time after.

If the comparison is performed as part of automated tooling, please use the diff-hook or author your tooling to handle the case where the build was not deterministic and also a check path does not exist.

--check is only usable if the derivation has been built on the system already. If the derivation has not been built Nix will fail with the error:

error: some outputs of '/nix/store/hzi1h60z2qf0nb85iwnpvrai3j2w7rr6-unstable.drv' 
are not valid, so checking is not possible

Run the build without --check, and then try with --check again.

Using the post-build-hook

Implementation Caveats

Here we use the post-build hook to upload to a binary cache. This is a simple and working example, but it is not suitable for all use cases.

The post build hook program runs after each executed build, and blocks the build loop. The build loop exits if the hook program fails.

Concretely, this implementation will make Nix slow or unusable when the internet is slow or unreliable.

A more advanced implementation might pass the store paths to a user-supplied daemon or queue for processing the store paths outside of the build loop.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have configured an S3-compatible binary cache, and that the root user's default AWS profile can upload to the bucket.

Set up a Signing Key

Use nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key to create our public and private signing keys. We will sign paths with the private key, and distribute the public key for verifying the authenticity of the paths.

# nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key example-nix-cache-1 /etc/nix/key.private /etc/nix/key.public
# cat /etc/nix/key.public
example-nix-cache-1:1/cKDz3QCCOmwcztD2eV6Coggp6rqc9DGjWv7C0G+rM=

Then update nix.conf on any machine that will access the cache. Add the cache URL to substituters and the public key to trusted-public-keys:

substituters = https://cache.nixos.org/ s3://example-nix-cache
trusted-public-keys = cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY= example-nix-cache-1:1/cKDz3QCCOmwcztD2eV6Coggp6rqc9DGjWv7C0G+rM=

Machines that build for the cache must sign derivations using the private key. On those machines, add the path to the key file to the secret-key-files field in their nix.conf:

secret-key-files = /etc/nix/key.private

We will restart the Nix daemon in a later step.

Implementing the build hook

Write the following script to /etc/nix/upload-to-cache.sh:

#!/bin/sh

set -eu
set -f # disable globbing
export IFS=' '

echo "Uploading paths" $OUT_PATHS
exec nix copy --to "s3://example-nix-cache" $OUT_PATHS

Note

The $OUT_PATHS variable is a space-separated list of Nix store paths. In this case, we expect and want the shell to perform word splitting to make each output path its own argument to nix store sign. Nix guarantees the paths will not contain any spaces, however a store path might contain glob characters. The set -f disables globbing in the shell.

Then make sure the hook program is executable by the root user:

# chmod +x /etc/nix/upload-to-cache.sh

Updating Nix Configuration

Edit /etc/nix/nix.conf to run our hook, by adding the following configuration snippet at the end:

post-build-hook = /etc/nix/upload-to-cache.sh

Then, restart the nix-daemon.

Testing

Build any derivation, for example:

$ nix-build -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).writeText "example" (builtins.toString builtins.currentTime)'
this derivation will be built:
  /nix/store/s4pnfbkalzy5qz57qs6yybna8wylkig6-example.drv
building '/nix/store/s4pnfbkalzy5qz57qs6yybna8wylkig6-example.drv'...
running post-build-hook '/home/grahamc/projects/github.com/NixOS/nix/post-hook.sh'...
post-build-hook: Signing paths /nix/store/ibcyipq5gf91838ldx40mjsp0b8w9n18-example
post-build-hook: Uploading paths /nix/store/ibcyipq5gf91838ldx40mjsp0b8w9n18-example
/nix/store/ibcyipq5gf91838ldx40mjsp0b8w9n18-example

Then delete the path from the store, and try substituting it from the binary cache:

$ rm ./result
$ nix-store --delete /nix/store/ibcyipq5gf91838ldx40mjsp0b8w9n18-example

Now, copy the path back from the cache:

$ nix-store --realise /nix/store/ibcyipq5gf91838ldx40mjsp0b8w9n18-example
copying path '/nix/store/m8bmqwrch6l3h8s0k3d673xpmipcdpsa-example from 's3://example-nix-cache'...
warning: you did not specify '--add-root'; the result might be removed by the garbage collector
/nix/store/m8bmqwrch6l3h8s0k3d673xpmipcdpsa-example

Conclusion

We now have a Nix installation configured to automatically sign and upload every local build to a remote binary cache.

Before deploying this to production, be sure to consider the implementation caveats.

This section lists commands and options that you can use when you work with Nix.

Common Options

Most Nix commands accept the following command-line options:

• --help
  Prints out a summary of the command syntax and exits.

• --version
  Prints out the Nix version number on standard output and exits.

• --verbose / -v
  Increases the level of verbosity of diagnostic messages printed on standard error. For each Nix operation, the information printed on standard output is well-defined; any diagnostic information is printed on standard error, never on standard output.

  This option may be specified repeatedly. Currently, the following verbosity levels exist:

  • 0
    “Errors only”: only print messages explaining why the Nix invocation failed.

  • 1
    “Informational”: print useful messages about what Nix is doing. This is the default.

  • 2
    “Talkative”: print more informational messages.

  • 3
    “Chatty”: print even more informational messages.

  • 4
    “Debug”: print debug information.

  • 5
    “Vomit”: print vast amounts of debug information.

• --quiet
  Decreases the level of verbosity of diagnostic messages printed on standard error. This is the inverse option to -v / --verbose.

  This option may be specified repeatedly. See the previous verbosity levels list.

• --log-format format
  This option can be used to change the output of the log format, with format being one of:

  • raw
    This is the raw format, as outputted by nix-build.

  • internal-json
    Outputs the logs in a structured manner.

    Warning

    While the schema itself is relatively stable, the format of the error-messages (namely of the msg-field) can change between releases.

  • bar
    Only display a progress bar during the builds.

  • bar-with-logs
    Display the raw logs, with the progress bar at the bottom.

• --no-build-output / -Q
  By default, output written by builders to standard output and standard error is echoed to the Nix command's standard error. This option suppresses this behaviour. Note that the builder's standard output and error are always written to a log file in prefix/nix/var/log/nix.

• --max-jobs / -j number
  Sets the maximum number of build jobs that Nix will perform in parallel to the specified number. Specify auto to use the number of CPUs in the system. The default is specified by the max-jobs configuration setting, which itself defaults to 1. A higher value is useful on SMP systems or to exploit I/O latency.

  Setting it to 0 disallows building on the local machine, which is useful when you want builds to happen only on remote builders.

• --cores
  Sets the value of the NIX_BUILD_CORES environment variable in the invocation of builders. Builders can use this variable at their discretion to control the maximum amount of parallelism. For instance, in Nixpkgs, if the derivation attribute enableParallelBuilding is set to true, the builder passes the -jN flag to GNU Make. It defaults to the value of the cores configuration setting, if set, or 1 otherwise. The value 0 means that the builder should use all available CPU cores in the system.

• --max-silent-time
  Sets the maximum number of seconds that a builder can go without producing any data on standard output or standard error. The default is specified by the max-silent-time configuration setting. 0 means no time-out.

• --timeout
  Sets the maximum number of seconds that a builder can run. The default is specified by the timeout configuration setting. 0 means no timeout.

• --keep-going / -k
  Keep going in case of failed builds, to the greatest extent possible. That is, if building an input of some derivation fails, Nix will still build the other inputs, but not the derivation itself. Without this option, Nix stops if any build fails (except for builds of substitutes), possibly killing builds in progress (in case of parallel or distributed builds).

• --keep-failed / -K
  Specifies that in case of a build failure, the temporary directory (usually in /tmp) in which the build takes place should not be deleted. The path of the build directory is printed as an informational message.

• --fallback
  Whenever Nix attempts to build a derivation for which substitutes are known for each output path, but realising the output paths through the substitutes fails, fall back on building the derivation.

  The most common scenario in which this is useful is when we have registered substitutes in order to perform binary distribution from, say, a network repository. If the repository is down, the realisation of the derivation will fail. When this option is specified, Nix will build the derivation instead. Thus, installation from binaries falls back on installation from source. This option is not the default since it is generally not desirable for a transient failure in obtaining the substitutes to lead to a full build from source (with the related consumption of resources).

• --readonly-mode
  When this option is used, no attempt is made to open the Nix database. Most Nix operations do need database access, so those operations will fail.

• --arg name value
  This option is accepted by nix-env, nix-instantiate, nix-shell and nix-build. When evaluating Nix expressions, the expression evaluator will automatically try to call functions that it encounters. It can automatically call functions for which every argument has a default value (e.g., { argName ? defaultValue }: ...). With --arg, you can also call functions that have arguments without a default value (or override a default value). That is, if the evaluator encounters a function with an argument named name, it will call it with value value.

  For instance, the top-level default.nix in Nixpkgs is actually a function:

  { # The system (e.g., `i686-linux') for which to build the packages.
    system ? builtins.currentSystem
    ...
  }: ...
  

  So if you call this Nix expression (e.g., when you do nix-env -iA pkgname), the function will be called automatically using the value builtins.currentSystem for the system argument. You can override this using --arg, e.g., nix-env -iA pkgname --arg system \"i686-freebsd\". (Note that since the argument is a Nix string literal, you have to escape the quotes.)

• --argstr name value
  This option is like --arg, only the value is not a Nix expression but a string. So instead of --arg system "i686-linux" (the outer quotes are to keep the shell happy) you can say --argstr system i686-linux.

• --attr / -A attrPath
  Select an attribute from the top-level Nix expression being evaluated. (nix-env, nix-instantiate, nix-build and nix-shell only.) The attribute path attrPath is a sequence of attribute names separated by dots. For instance, given a top-level Nix expression e, the attribute path xorg.xorgserver would cause the expression e.xorg.xorgserver to be used. See nix-env --install for some concrete examples.

  In addition to attribute names, you can also specify array indices. For instance, the attribute path foo.3.bar selects the bar attribute of the fourth element of the array in the foo attribute of the top-level expression.

• --expr / -E
  Interpret the command line arguments as a list of Nix expressions to be parsed and evaluated, rather than as a list of file names of Nix expressions. (nix-instantiate, nix-build and nix-shell only.)

  For nix-shell, this option is commonly used to give you a shell in which you can build the packages returned by the expression. If you want to get a shell which contain the built packages ready for use, give your expression to the nix-shell -p convenience flag instead.

• -I path
  Add a path to the Nix expression search path. This option may be given multiple times. See the NIX_PATH environment variable for information on the semantics of the Nix search path. Paths added through -I take precedence over NIX_PATH.

• --option name value
  Set the Nix configuration option name to value. This overrides settings in the Nix configuration file (see nix.conf5).

• --repair
  Fix corrupted or missing store paths by redownloading or rebuilding them. Note that this is slow because it requires computing a cryptographic hash of the contents of every path in the closure of the build. Also note the warning under nix-store --repair-path.

Common Environment Variables

Most Nix commands interpret the following environment variables:

• IN_NIX_SHELL
  Indicator that tells if the current environment was set up by nix-shell. It can have the values pure or impure.

• NIX_PATH
  A colon-separated list of directories used to look up the location of Nix expressions using paths enclosed in angle brackets (i.e., <path>), e.g. /home/eelco/Dev:/etc/nixos. It can be extended using the -I option.

• NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE
  Normally, the Nix store directory (typically /nix/store) is not allowed to contain any symlink components. This is to prevent “impure” builds. Builders sometimes “canonicalise” paths by resolving all symlink components. Thus, builds on different machines (with /nix/store resolving to different locations) could yield different results. This is generally not a problem, except when builds are deployed to machines where /nix/store resolves differently. If you are sure that you’re not going to do that, you can set NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE to 1.

  Note that if you’re symlinking the Nix store so that you can put it on another file system than the root file system, on Linux you’re better off using bind mount points, e.g.,

  $ mkdir /nix
  $ mount -o bind /mnt/otherdisk/nix /nix
  

  Consult the mount 8 manual page for details.

• NIX_STORE_DIR
  Overrides the location of the Nix store (default prefix/store).

• NIX_DATA_DIR
  Overrides the location of the Nix static data directory (default prefix/share).

• NIX_LOG_DIR
  Overrides the location of the Nix log directory (default prefix/var/log/nix).

• NIX_STATE_DIR
  Overrides the location of the Nix state directory (default prefix/var/nix).

• NIX_CONF_DIR
  Overrides the location of the system Nix configuration directory (default prefix/etc/nix).

• NIX_CONFIG
  Applies settings from Nix configuration from the environment. The content is treated as if it was read from a Nix configuration file. Settings are separated by the newline character.

• NIX_USER_CONF_FILES
  Overrides the location of the user Nix configuration files to load from (defaults to the XDG spec locations). The variable is treated as a list separated by the : token.

• TMPDIR
  Use the specified directory to store temporary files. In particular, this includes temporary build directories; these can take up substantial amounts of disk space. The default is /tmp.

• NIX_REMOTE
  This variable should be set to daemon if you want to use the Nix daemon to execute Nix operations. This is necessary in multi-user Nix installations. If the Nix daemon's Unix socket is at some non-standard path, this variable should be set to unix://path/to/socket. Otherwise, it should be left unset.

• NIX_SHOW_STATS
  If set to 1, Nix will print some evaluation statistics, such as the number of values allocated.

• NIX_COUNT_CALLS
  If set to 1, Nix will print how often functions were called during Nix expression evaluation. This is useful for profiling your Nix expressions.

• GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE
  If Nix has been configured to use the Boehm garbage collector, this variable sets the initial size of the heap in bytes. It defaults to 384 MiB. Setting it to a low value reduces memory consumption, but will increase runtime due to the overhead of garbage collection.

Main Commands

This section lists commands and options that you can use when you work with Nix.

Name

nix-env - manipulate or query Nix user environments

Synopsis

nix-env [--option name value] [--arg name value] [--argstr name value] [{--file | -f} path] [{--profile | -p} *path(] [--system-filter system] [--dry-run] operation [options…] [arguments…]

Description

The command nix-env is used to manipulate Nix user environments. User environments are sets of software packages available to a user at some point in time. In other words, they are a synthesised view of the programs available in the Nix store. There may be many user environments: different users can have different environments, and individual users can switch between different environments.

nix-env takes exactly one operation flag which indicates the subcommand to be performed. These are documented below.

Selectors

Several commands, such as nix-env -q and nix-env -i, take a list of arguments that specify the packages on which to operate. These are extended regular expressions that must match the entire name of the package. (For details on regular expressions, see regex(7).) The match is case-sensitive. The regular expression can optionally be followed by a dash and a version number; if omitted, any version of the package will match. Here are some examples:

• firefox
  Matches the package name firefox and any version.

• firefox-32.0
  Matches the package name firefox and version 32.0.

• gtk\\+
  Matches the package name gtk+. The + character must be escaped using a backslash to prevent it from being interpreted as a quantifier, and the backslash must be escaped in turn with another backslash to ensure that the shell passes it on.

• .\*
  Matches any package name. This is the default for most commands.

• '.*zip.*'
  Matches any package name containing the string zip. Note the dots: '*zip*' does not work, because in a regular expression, the character * is interpreted as a quantifier.

• '.*(firefox|chromium).*'
  Matches any package name containing the strings firefox or chromium.

Common options

This section lists the options that are common to all operations. These options are allowed for every subcommand, though they may not always have an effect.

• --file / -f path
  Specifies the Nix expression (designated below as the active Nix expression) used by the --install, --upgrade, and --query --available operations to obtain derivations. The default is ~/.nix-defexpr.

  If the argument starts with http:// or https://, it is interpreted as the URL of a tarball that will be downloaded and unpacked to a temporary location. The tarball must include a single top-level directory containing at least a file named default.nix.

• --profile / -p path
  Specifies the profile to be used by those operations that operate on a profile (designated below as the active profile). A profile is a sequence of user environments called generations, one of which is the current generation.

• --dry-run
  For the --install, --upgrade, --uninstall, --switch-generation, --delete-generations and --rollback operations, this flag will cause nix-env to print what would be done if this flag had not been specified, without actually doing it.

  --dry-run also prints out which paths will be substituted (i.e., downloaded) and which paths will be built from source (because no substitute is available).

• --system-filter system
  By default, operations such as --query --available show derivations matching any platform. This option allows you to use derivations for the specified platform system.

Files

• ~/.nix-defexpr
  The source for the default Nix expressions used by the --install, --upgrade, and --query --available operations to obtain derivations. The --file option may be used to override this default.

  If ~/.nix-defexpr is a file, it is loaded as a Nix expression. If the expression is a set, it is used as the default Nix expression. If the expression is a function, an empty set is passed as argument and the return value is used as the default Nix expression.

  If ~/.nix-defexpr is a directory containing a default.nix file, that file is loaded as in the above paragraph.

  If ~/.nix-defexpr is a directory without a default.nix file, then its contents (both files and subdirectories) are loaded as Nix expressions. The expressions are combined into a single set, each expression under an attribute with the same name as the original file or subdirectory.

  For example, if ~/.nix-defexpr contains two files, foo.nix and bar.nix, then the default Nix expression will essentially be

  {
    foo = import ~/.nix-defexpr/foo.nix;
    bar = import ~/.nix-defexpr/bar.nix;
  }
  

  The file manifest.nix is always ignored. Subdirectories without a default.nix file are traversed recursively in search of more Nix expressions, but the names of these intermediate directories are not added to the attribute paths of the default Nix expression.

  The command nix-channel places symlinks to the downloaded Nix expressions from each subscribed channel in this directory.

• ~/.nix-profile
  A symbolic link to the user's current profile. By default, this symlink points to prefix/var/nix/profiles/default. The PATH environment variable should include ~/.nix-profile/bin for the user environment to be visible to the user.

Operation --install

Synopsis

nix-env {--install | -i} args… [{--prebuilt-only | -b}] [{--attr | -A}] [--from-expression] [-E] [--from-profile path] [--preserve-installed | -P] [--remove-all | -r]

Description

The install operation creates a new user environment, based on the current generation of the active profile, to which a set of store paths described by args is added. The arguments args map to store paths in a number of possible ways:

• By default, args is a set of derivation names denoting derivations in the active Nix expression. These are realised, and the resulting output paths are installed. Currently installed derivations with a name equal to the name of a derivation being added are removed unless the option --preserve-installed is specified.

  If there are multiple derivations matching a name in args that have the same name (e.g., gcc-3.3.6 and gcc-4.1.1), then the derivation with the highest priority is used. A derivation can define a priority by declaring the meta.priority attribute. This attribute should be a number, with a higher value denoting a lower priority. The default priority is 0.

  If there are multiple matching derivations with the same priority, then the derivation with the highest version will be installed.

  You can force the installation of multiple derivations with the same name by being specific about the versions. For instance, nix-env -i gcc-3.3.6 gcc-4.1.1 will install both version of GCC (and will probably cause a user environment conflict!).

• If --attr (-A) is specified, the arguments are attribute paths that select attributes from the top-level Nix expression. This is faster than using derivation names and unambiguous. To find out the attribute paths of available packages, use nix-env -qaP.

• If --from-profile path is given, args is a set of names denoting installed store paths in the profile path. This is an easy way to copy user environment elements from one profile to another.

• If --from-expression is given, args are Nix functions that are called with the active Nix expression as their single argument. The derivations returned by those function calls are installed. This allows derivations to be specified in an unambiguous way, which is necessary if there are multiple derivations with the same name.

• If args are store derivations, then these are realised, and the resulting output paths are installed.

• If args are store paths that are not store derivations, then these are realised and installed.

• By default all outputs are installed for each derivation. That can be reduced by setting meta.outputsToInstall.

Flags

• --prebuilt-only / -b
  Use only derivations for which a substitute is registered, i.e., there is a pre-built binary available that can be downloaded in lieu of building the derivation. Thus, no packages will be built from source.

• --preserve-installed; -P
  Do not remove derivations with a name matching one of the derivations being installed. Usually, trying to have two versions of the same package installed in the same generation of a profile will lead to an error in building the generation, due to file name clashes between the two versions. However, this is not the case for all packages.

• --remove-all; -r
  Remove all previously installed packages first. This is equivalent to running nix-env -e '.*' first, except that everything happens in a single transaction.

Examples

To install a package using a specific attribute path from the active Nix expression:

$ nix-env -iA gcc40mips
installing `gcc-4.0.2'
$ nix-env -iA xorg.xorgserver
installing `xorg-server-1.2.0'

To install a specific version of gcc using the derivation name:

$ nix-env --install gcc-3.3.2
installing `gcc-3.3.2'
uninstalling `gcc-3.1'

Using attribute path for selecting a package is preferred, as it is much faster and there will not be multiple matches.

Note the previously installed version is removed, since --preserve-installed was not specified.

To install an arbitrary version:

$ nix-env --install gcc
installing `gcc-3.3.2'

To install all derivations in the Nix expression foo.nix:

$ nix-env -f ~/foo.nix -i '.*'

To copy the store path with symbolic name gcc from another profile:

$ nix-env -i --from-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/foo gcc

To install a specific store derivation (typically created by nix-instantiate):

$ nix-env -i /nix/store/fibjb1bfbpm5mrsxc4mh2d8n37sxh91i-gcc-3.4.3.drv

To install a specific output path:

$ nix-env -i /nix/store/y3cgx0xj1p4iv9x0pnnmdhr8iyg741vk-gcc-3.4.3

To install from a Nix expression specified on the command-line:

$ nix-env -f ./foo.nix -i -E \
    'f: (f {system = "i686-linux";}).subversionWithJava'

I.e., this evaluates to (f: (f {system = "i686-linux";}).subversionWithJava) (import ./foo.nix), thus selecting the subversionWithJava attribute from the set returned by calling the function defined in ./foo.nix.

A dry-run tells you which paths will be downloaded or built from source:

$ nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA hello --dry-run
(dry run; not doing anything)
installing ‘hello-2.10’
this path will be fetched (0.04 MiB download, 0.19 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/wkhdf9jinag5750mqlax6z2zbwhqb76n-hello-2.10
  ...

To install Firefox from the latest revision in the Nixpkgs/NixOS 14.12 channel:

$ nix-env -f https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz -iA firefox

Operation --upgrade

Synopsis

nix-env {--upgrade | -u} args [--lt | --leq | --eq | --always] [{--prebuilt-only | -b}] [{--attr | -A}] [--from-expression] [-E] [--from-profile path] [--preserve-installed | -P]

Description

The upgrade operation creates a new user environment, based on the current generation of the active profile, in which all store paths are replaced for which there are newer versions in the set of paths described by args. Paths for which there are no newer versions are left untouched; this is not an error. It is also not an error if an element of args matches no installed derivations.

For a description of how args is mapped to a set of store paths, see --install. If args describes multiple store paths with the same symbolic name, only the one with the highest version is installed.

Flags

• --lt
  Only upgrade a derivation to newer versions. This is the default.

• --leq
  In addition to upgrading to newer versions, also “upgrade” to derivations that have the same version. Version are not a unique identification of a derivation, so there may be many derivations that have the same version. This flag may be useful to force “synchronisation” between the installed and available derivations.

• --eq
  Only “upgrade” to derivations that have the same version. This may not seem very useful, but it actually is, e.g., when there is a new release of Nixpkgs and you want to replace installed applications with the same versions built against newer dependencies (to reduce the number of dependencies floating around on your system).

• --always
  In addition to upgrading to newer versions, also “upgrade” to derivations that have the same or a lower version. I.e., derivations may actually be downgraded depending on what is available in the active Nix expression.

For the other flags, see --install.

Examples

$ nix-env --upgrade -A nixpkgs.gcc
upgrading `gcc-3.3.1' to `gcc-3.4'

When there are no updates available, nothing will happen:

$ nix-env --upgrade -A nixpkgs.pan

Using -A is preferred when possible, as it is faster and unambiguous but it is also possible to upgrade to a specific version by matching the derivation name:

$ nix-env -u gcc-3.3.2 --always
upgrading `gcc-3.4' to `gcc-3.3.2'

To try to upgrade everything (matching packages based on the part of the derivation name without version):

$ nix-env -u
upgrading `hello-2.1.2' to `hello-2.1.3'
upgrading `mozilla-1.2' to `mozilla-1.4'

Versions

The upgrade operation determines whether a derivation y is an upgrade of a derivation x by looking at their respective name attributes. The names (e.g., gcc-3.3.1 are split into two parts: the package name (gcc), and the version (3.3.1). The version part starts after the first dash not followed by a letter. y is considered an upgrade of x if their package names match, and the version of y is higher than that of x.

The versions are compared by splitting them into contiguous components of numbers and letters. E.g., 3.3.1pre5 is split into [3, 3, 1, "pre", 5]. These lists are then compared lexicographically (from left to right). Corresponding components a and b are compared as follows. If they are both numbers, integer comparison is used. If a is an empty string and b is a number, a is considered less than b. The special string component pre (for pre-release) is considered to be less than other components. String components are considered less than number components. Otherwise, they are compared lexicographically (i.e., using case-sensitive string comparison).

This is illustrated by the following examples:

1.0 < 2.3
2.1 < 2.3
2.3 = 2.3
2.5 > 2.3
3.1 > 2.3
2.3.1 > 2.3
2.3.1 > 2.3a
2.3pre1 < 2.3
2.3pre3 < 2.3pre12
2.3a < 2.3c
2.3pre1 < 2.3c
2.3pre1 < 2.3q

Operation --uninstall

Synopsis

nix-env {--uninstall | -e} drvnames…

Description

The uninstall operation creates a new user environment, based on the current generation of the active profile, from which the store paths designated by the symbolic names drvnames are removed.

Examples

$ nix-env --uninstall gcc
$ nix-env -e '.*' (remove everything)

Operation --set

Synopsis

nix-env --set drvname

Description

The --set operation modifies the current generation of a profile so that it contains exactly the specified derivation, and nothing else.

Examples

The following updates a profile such that its current generation will contain just Firefox:

$ nix-env -p /nix/var/nix/profiles/browser --set firefox

Operation --set-flag

Synopsis

nix-env --set-flag name value drvnames

Description

The --set-flag operation allows meta attributes of installed packages to be modified. There are several attributes that can be usefully modified, because they affect the behaviour of nix-env or the user environment build script:

• priority can be changed to resolve filename clashes. The user environment build script uses the meta.priority attribute of derivations to resolve filename collisions between packages. Lower priority values denote a higher priority. For instance, the GCC wrapper package and the Binutils package in Nixpkgs both have a file bin/ld, so previously if you tried to install both you would get a collision. Now, on the other hand, the GCC wrapper declares a higher priority than Binutils, so the former’s bin/ld is symlinked in the user environment.

• keep can be set to true to prevent the package from being upgraded or replaced. This is useful if you want to hang on to an older version of a package.

• active can be set to false to “disable” the package. That is, no symlinks will be generated to the files of the package, but it remains part of the profile (so it won’t be garbage-collected). It can be set back to true to re-enable the package.

Examples

To prevent the currently installed Firefox from being upgraded:

$ nix-env --set-flag keep true firefox

After this, nix-env -u will ignore Firefox.

To disable the currently installed Firefox, then install a new Firefox while the old remains part of the profile:

$ nix-env -q
firefox-2.0.0.9 (the current one)

$ nix-env --preserve-installed -i firefox-2.0.0.11
installing `firefox-2.0.0.11'
building path(s) `/nix/store/myy0y59q3ig70dgq37jqwg1j0rsapzsl-user-environment'
collision between `/nix/store/...-firefox-2.0.0.11/bin/firefox'
  and `/nix/store/...-firefox-2.0.0.9/bin/firefox'.
(i.e., can’t have two active at the same time)

$ nix-env --set-flag active false firefox
setting flag on `firefox-2.0.0.9'

$ nix-env --preserve-installed -i firefox-2.0.0.11
installing `firefox-2.0.0.11'

$ nix-env -q
firefox-2.0.0.11 (the enabled one)
firefox-2.0.0.9 (the disabled one)

To make files from binutils take precedence over files from gcc:

$ nix-env --set-flag priority 5 binutils
$ nix-env --set-flag priority 10 gcc

Operation --query

Synopsis

nix-env {--query | -q} names… [--installed | --available | -a] [{--status | -s}] [{--attr-path | -P}] [--no-name] [{--compare-versions | -c}] [--system] [--drv-path] [--out-path] [--description] [--meta] [--xml] [--json] [{--prebuilt-only | -b}] [{--attr | -A} attribute-path]

Description

The query operation displays information about either the store paths that are installed in the current generation of the active profile (--installed), or the derivations that are available for installation in the active Nix expression (--available). It only prints information about derivations whose symbolic name matches one of names.

The derivations are sorted by their name attributes.

Source selection

The following flags specify the set of things on which the query operates.

• --installed
  The query operates on the store paths that are installed in the current generation of the active profile. This is the default.

• --available; -a
  The query operates on the derivations that are available in the active Nix expression.

Queries

The following flags specify what information to display about the selected derivations. Multiple flags may be specified, in which case the information is shown in the order given here. Note that the name of the derivation is shown unless --no-name is specified.

• --xml
  Print the result in an XML representation suitable for automatic processing by other tools. The root element is called items, which contains a item element for each available or installed derivation. The fields discussed below are all stored in attributes of the item elements.

• --json
  Print the result in a JSON representation suitable for automatic processing by other tools.

• --prebuilt-only / -b
  Show only derivations for which a substitute is registered, i.e., there is a pre-built binary available that can be downloaded in lieu of building the derivation. Thus, this shows all packages that probably can be installed quickly.

• --status; -s
  Print the status of the derivation. The status consists of three characters. The first is I or -, indicating whether the derivation is currently installed in the current generation of the active profile. This is by definition the case for --installed, but not for --available. The second is P or -, indicating whether the derivation is present on the system. This indicates whether installation of an available derivation will require the derivation to be built. The third is S or -, indicating whether a substitute is available for the derivation.

• --attr-path; -P
  Print the attribute path of the derivation, which can be used to unambiguously select it using the --attr option available in commands that install derivations like nix-env --install. This option only works together with --available

• --no-name
  Suppress printing of the name attribute of each derivation.

• --compare-versions / -c
  Compare installed versions to available versions, or vice versa (if --available is given). This is useful for quickly seeing whether upgrades for installed packages are available in a Nix expression. A column is added with the following meaning:

  • < version
    A newer version of the package is available or installed.

  • = version
    At most the same version of the package is available or installed.

  • > version
    Only older versions of the package are available or installed.

  • - ?
    No version of the package is available or installed.

• --system
  Print the system attribute of the derivation.

• --drv-path
  Print the path of the store derivation.

• --out-path
  Print the output path of the derivation.

• --description
  Print a short (one-line) description of the derivation, if available. The description is taken from the meta.description attribute of the derivation.

• --meta
  Print all of the meta-attributes of the derivation. This option is only available with --xml or --json.

Examples

To show installed packages:

$ nix-env -q
bison-1.875c
docbook-xml-4.2
firefox-1.0.4
MPlayer-1.0pre7
ORBit2-2.8.3
…

To show available packages:

$ nix-env -qa
firefox-1.0.7
GConf-2.4.0.1
MPlayer-1.0pre7
ORBit2-2.8.3
…

To show the status of available packages:

$ nix-env -qas
-P- firefox-1.0.7   (not installed but present)
--S GConf-2.4.0.1   (not present, but there is a substitute for fast installation)
--S MPlayer-1.0pre3 (i.e., this is not the installed MPlayer, even though the version is the same!)
IP- ORBit2-2.8.3    (installed and by definition present)
…

To show available packages in the Nix expression foo.nix:

$ nix-env -f ./foo.nix -qa
foo-1.2.3

To compare installed versions to what’s available:

$ nix-env -qc
...
acrobat-reader-7.0 - ?      (package is not available at all)
autoconf-2.59      = 2.59   (same version)
firefox-1.0.4      < 1.0.7  (a more recent version is available)
...

To show all packages with “zip” in the name:

$ nix-env -qa '.*zip.*'
bzip2-1.0.6
gzip-1.6
zip-3.0
…

To show all packages with “firefox” or “chromium” in the name:

$ nix-env -qa '.*(firefox|chromium).*'
chromium-37.0.2062.94
chromium-beta-38.0.2125.24
firefox-32.0.3
firefox-with-plugins-13.0.1
…

To show all packages in the latest revision of the Nixpkgs repository:

$ nix-env -f https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/master.tar.gz -qa

Operation --switch-profile

Synopsis

nix-env {--switch-profile | -S} path

Description

This operation makes path the current profile for the user. That is, the symlink ~/.nix-profile is made to point to path.

Examples

$ nix-env -S ~/my-profile

Operation --list-generations

Synopsis

nix-env --list-generations

Description

This operation print a list of all the currently existing generations for the active profile. These may be switched to using the --switch-generation operation. It also prints the creation date of the generation, and indicates the current generation.

Examples

$ nix-env --list-generations
  95   2004-02-06 11:48:24
  96   2004-02-06 11:49:01
  97   2004-02-06 16:22:45
  98   2004-02-06 16:24:33   (current)

Operation --delete-generations

Synopsis

nix-env --delete-generations generations

Description

This operation deletes the specified generations of the current profile. The generations can be a list of generation numbers, the special value old to delete all non-current generations, a value such as 30d to delete all generations older than the specified number of days (except for the generation that was active at that point in time), or a value such as +5 to keep the last 5 generations ignoring any newer than current, e.g., if 30 is the current generation +5 will delete generation 25 and all older generations. Periodically deleting old generations is important to make garbage collection effective.

Examples

$ nix-env --delete-generations 3 4 8

$ nix-env --delete-generations +5

$ nix-env --delete-generations 30d

$ nix-env -p other_profile --delete-generations old

Operation --switch-generation

Synopsis

nix-env {--switch-generation | -G} generation

Description

This operation makes generation number generation the current generation of the active profile. That is, if the profile is the path to the active profile, then the symlink profile is made to point to profile-generation-link, which is in turn a symlink to the actual user environment in the Nix store.

Switching will fail if the specified generation does not exist.

Examples

$ nix-env -G 42
switching from generation 50 to 42

Operation --rollback

Synopsis

nix-env --rollback

Description

This operation switches to the “previous” generation of the active profile, that is, the highest numbered generation lower than the current generation, if it exists. It is just a convenience wrapper around --list-generations and --switch-generation.

Examples

$ nix-env --rollback
switching from generation 92 to 91

$ nix-env --rollback
error: no generation older than the current (91) exists

Environment variables

• NIX_PROFILE
  Location of the Nix profile. Defaults to the target of the symlink ~/.nix-profile, if it exists, or /nix/var/nix/profiles/default otherwise.

Name

nix-build - build a Nix expression

Synopsis

nix-build [paths…] [--arg name value] [--argstr name value] [{--attr | -A} attrPath] [--no-out-link] [--dry-run] [{--out-link | -o} outlink]

Disambiguation

This man page describes the command nix-build, which is distinct from nix build. For documentation on the latter, run nix build --help or see man nix3-build.

Description

The nix-build command builds the derivations described by the Nix expressions in paths. If the build succeeds, it places a symlink to the result in the current directory. The symlink is called result. If there are multiple Nix expressions, or the Nix expressions evaluate to multiple derivations, multiple sequentially numbered symlinks are created (result, result-2, and so on).

If no paths are specified, then nix-build will use default.nix in the current directory, if it exists.

If an element of paths starts with http:// or https://, it is interpreted as the URL of a tarball that will be downloaded and unpacked to a temporary location. The tarball must include a single top-level directory containing at least a file named default.nix.

nix-build is essentially a wrapper around nix-instantiate (to translate a high-level Nix expression to a low-level store derivation) and nix-store --realise (to build the store derivation).

Warning

The result of the build is automatically registered as a root of the Nix garbage collector. This root disappears automatically when the result symlink is deleted or renamed. So don’t rename the symlink.

Options

All options not listed here are passed to nix-store --realise, except for --arg and --attr / -A which are passed to nix-instantiate.

• --no-out-link

  Do not create a symlink to the output path. Note that as a result the output does not become a root of the garbage collector, and so might be deleted by nix-store --gc.

• --dry-run

  Show what store paths would be built or downloaded.

• --out-link / -o outlink

  Change the name of the symlink to the output path created from result to outlink.

The following common options are supported:

Examples

$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A firefox
store derivation is /nix/store/qybprl8sz2lc...-firefox-1.5.0.7.drv
/nix/store/d18hyl92g30l...-firefox-1.5.0.7

$ ls -l result
lrwxrwxrwx  ...  result -> /nix/store/d18hyl92g30l...-firefox-1.5.0.7

$ ls ./result/bin/
firefox  firefox-config

If a derivation has multiple outputs, nix-build will build the default (first) output. You can also build all outputs:

$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A openssl.all

This will create a symlink for each output named result-outputname. The suffix is omitted if the output name is out. So if openssl has outputs out, bin and man, nix-build will create symlinks result, result-bin and result-man. It’s also possible to build a specific output:

$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A openssl.man

This will create a symlink result-man.

Build a Nix expression given on the command line:

$ nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> { }; runCommand "foo" { } "echo bar > $out"'
$ cat ./result
bar

Build the GNU Hello package from the latest revision of the master branch of Nixpkgs:

$ nix-build https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/master.tar.gz -A hello

Name

nix-shell - start an interactive shell based on a Nix expression

Synopsis

nix-shell [--arg name value] [--argstr name value] [{--attr | -A} attrPath] [--command cmd] [--run cmd] [--exclude regexp] [--pure] [--keep name] {{--packages | -p} {packages | expressions} … | [path]}

Disambiguation

This man page describes the command nix-shell, which is distinct from nix shell. For documentation on the latter, run nix shell --help or see man nix3-shell.

Description

The command nix-shell will build the dependencies of the specified derivation, but not the derivation itself. It will then start an interactive shell in which all environment variables defined by the derivation path have been set to their corresponding values, and the script $stdenv/setup has been sourced. This is useful for reproducing the environment of a derivation for development.

If path is not given, nix-shell defaults to shell.nix if it exists, and default.nix otherwise.

If path starts with http:// or https://, it is interpreted as the URL of a tarball that will be downloaded and unpacked to a temporary location. The tarball must include a single top-level directory containing at least a file named default.nix.

If the derivation defines the variable shellHook, it will be run after $stdenv/setup has been sourced. Since this hook is not executed by regular Nix builds, it allows you to perform initialisation specific to nix-shell. For example, the derivation attribute

shellHook =
  ''
    echo "Hello shell"
    export SOME_API_TOKEN="$(cat ~/.config/some-app/api-token)"
  '';

will cause nix-shell to print Hello shell and set the SOME_API_TOKEN environment variable to a user-configured value.

Options

All options not listed here are passed to nix-store --realise, except for --arg and --attr / -A which are passed to nix-instantiate.

• --command cmd
  In the environment of the derivation, run the shell command cmd. This command is executed in an interactive shell. (Use --run to use a non-interactive shell instead.) However, a call to exit is implicitly added to the command, so the shell will exit after running the command. To prevent this, add return at the end; e.g. --command "echo Hello; return" will print Hello and then drop you into the interactive shell. This can be useful for doing any additional initialisation.

• --run cmd
  Like --command, but executes the command in a non-interactive shell. This means (among other things) that if you hit Ctrl-C while the command is running, the shell exits.

• --exclude regexp
  Do not build any dependencies whose store path matches the regular expression regexp. This option may be specified multiple times.

• --pure
  If this flag is specified, the environment is almost entirely cleared before the interactive shell is started, so you get an environment that more closely corresponds to the “real” Nix build. A few variables, in particular HOME, USER and DISPLAY, are retained.

• --packages / -p packages…
  Set up an environment in which the specified packages are present. The command line arguments are interpreted as attribute names inside the Nix Packages collection. Thus, nix-shell -p libjpeg openjdk will start a shell in which the packages denoted by the attribute names libjpeg and openjdk are present.

• -i interpreter
  The chained script interpreter to be invoked by nix-shell. Only applicable in #!-scripts (described below).

• --keep name
  When a --pure shell is started, keep the listed environment variables.

The following common options are supported:

Environment variables

• NIX_BUILD_SHELL
  Shell used to start the interactive environment. Defaults to the bash found in <nixpkgs>, falling back to the bash found in PATH if not found.

Examples

To build the dependencies of the package Pan, and start an interactive shell in which to build it:

$ nix-shell '<nixpkgs>' -A pan
[nix-shell]$ eval ${unpackPhase:-unpackPhase}
[nix-shell]$ cd pan-*
[nix-shell]$ eval ${configurePhase:-configurePhase}
[nix-shell]$ eval ${buildPhase:-buildPhase}
[nix-shell]$ ./pan/gui/pan

The reason we use form eval ${configurePhase:-configurePhase} here is because those packages that override these phases do so by exporting the overridden values in the environment variable of the same name. Here bash is being told to either evaluate the contents of 'configurePhase', if it exists as a variable, otherwise evaluate the configurePhase function.

To clear the environment first, and do some additional automatic initialisation of the interactive shell:

$ nix-shell '<nixpkgs>' -A pan --pure \
    --command 'export NIX_DEBUG=1; export NIX_CORES=8; return'

Nix expressions can also be given on the command line using the -E and -p flags. For instance, the following starts a shell containing the packages sqlite and libX11:

$ nix-shell -E 'with import <nixpkgs> { }; runCommand "dummy" { buildInputs = [ sqlite xorg.libX11 ]; } ""'

A shorter way to do the same is:

$ nix-shell -p sqlite xorg.libX11
[nix-shell]$ echo $NIX_LDFLAGS
… -L/nix/store/j1zg5v…-sqlite-3.8.0.2/lib -L/nix/store/0gmcz9…-libX11-1.6.1/lib …

Note that -p accepts multiple full nix expressions that are valid in the buildInputs = [ ... ] shown above, not only package names. So the following is also legal:

$ nix-shell -p sqlite 'git.override { withManual = false; }'

The -p flag looks up Nixpkgs in the Nix search path. You can override it by passing -I or setting NIX_PATH. For example, the following gives you a shell containing the Pan package from a specific revision of Nixpkgs:

$ nix-shell -p pan -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/8a3eea054838b55aca962c3fbde9c83c102b8bf2.tar.gz

[nix-shell:~]$ pan --version
Pan 0.139

Use as a #!-interpreter

You can use nix-shell as a script interpreter to allow scripts written in arbitrary languages to obtain their own dependencies via Nix. This is done by starting the script with the following lines:

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i real-interpreter -p packages

where real-interpreter is the “real” script interpreter that will be invoked by nix-shell after it has obtained the dependencies and initialised the environment, and packages are the attribute names of the dependencies in Nixpkgs.

The lines starting with #! nix-shell specify nix-shell options (see above). Note that you cannot write #! /usr/bin/env nix-shell -i ... because many operating systems only allow one argument in #! lines.

For example, here is a Python script that depends on Python and the prettytable package:

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i python -p python pythonPackages.prettytable

import prettytable

# Print a simple table.
t = prettytable.PrettyTable(["N", "N^2"])
for n in range(1, 10): t.add_row([n, n * n])
print t

Similarly, the following is a Perl script that specifies that it requires Perl and the HTML::TokeParser::Simple and LWP packages:

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i perl -p perl perlPackages.HTMLTokeParserSimple perlPackages.LWP

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

# Fetch nixos.org and print all hrefs.
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(url => 'http://nixos.org/');

while (my $token = $p->get_tag("a")) {
    my $href = $token->get_attr("href");
    print "$href\n" if $href;
}

Sometimes you need to pass a simple Nix expression to customize a package like Terraform:

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i bash -p "terraform.withPlugins (plugins: [ plugins.openstack ])"

terraform apply

Note

You must use double quotes (") when passing a simple Nix expression in a nix-shell shebang.

Finally, using the merging of multiple nix-shell shebangs the following Haskell script uses a specific branch of Nixpkgs/NixOS (the 20.03 stable branch):

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i runghc -p "haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages (ps: [ps.download-curl ps.tagsoup])"
#! nix-shell -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-20.03.tar.gz

import Network.Curl.Download
import Text.HTML.TagSoup
import Data.Either
import Data.ByteString.Char8 (unpack)

-- Fetch nixos.org and print all hrefs.
main = do
  resp <- openURI "https://nixos.org/"
  let tags = filter (isTagOpenName "a") $ parseTags $ unpack $ fromRight undefined resp
  let tags' = map (fromAttrib "href") tags
  mapM_ putStrLn $ filter (/= "") tags'

If you want to be even more precise, you can specify a specific revision of Nixpkgs:

#! nix-shell -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/0672315759b3e15e2121365f067c1c8c56bb4722.tar.gz

The examples above all used -p to get dependencies from Nixpkgs. You can also use a Nix expression to build your own dependencies. For example, the Python example could have been written as:

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell deps.nix -i python

where the file deps.nix in the same directory as the #!-script contains:

with import <nixpkgs> {};

runCommand "dummy" { buildInputs = [ python pythonPackages.prettytable ]; } ""

Name

nix-store - manipulate or query the Nix store

Synopsis

nix-store operation [options…] [arguments…] [--option name value] [--add-root path]

Description

The command nix-store performs primitive operations on the Nix store. You generally do not need to run this command manually.

nix-store takes exactly one operation flag which indicates the subcommand to be performed. These are documented below.

Common options

This section lists the options that are common to all operations. These options are allowed for every subcommand, though they may not always have an effect.

• --add-root path

  Causes the result of a realisation (--realise and --force-realise) to be registered as a root of the garbage collector. path will be created as a symlink to the resulting store path. In addition, a uniquely named symlink to path will be created in /nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto/. For instance,

  $ nix-store --add-root /home/eelco/bla/result -r ...
  
  $ ls -l /nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto
  lrwxrwxrwx    1 ... 2005-03-13 21:10 dn54lcypm8f8... -> /home/eelco/bla/result
  
  $ ls -l /home/eelco/bla/result
  lrwxrwxrwx    1 ... 2005-03-13 21:10 /home/eelco/bla/result -> /nix/store/1r11343n6qd4...-f-spot-0.0.10
  

  Thus, when /home/eelco/bla/result is removed, the GC root in the auto directory becomes a dangling symlink and will be ignored by the collector.

  Warning

  Note that it is not possible to move or rename GC roots, since the symlink in the auto directory will still point to the old location.

  If there are multiple results, then multiple symlinks will be created by sequentially numbering symlinks beyond the first one (e.g., foo, foo-2, foo-3, and so on).

Operation --realise

Synopsis

nix-store {--realise | -r} paths… [--dry-run]

Description

The operation --realise essentially “builds” the specified store paths. Realisation is a somewhat overloaded term:

• If the store path is a derivation, realisation ensures that the output paths of the derivation are valid (i.e., the output path and its closure exist in the file system). This can be done in several ways. First, it is possible that the outputs are already valid, in which case we are done immediately. Otherwise, there may be substitutes that produce the outputs (e.g., by downloading them). Finally, the outputs can be produced by running the build task described by the derivation.

• If the store path is not a derivation, realisation ensures that the specified path is valid (i.e., it and its closure exist in the file system). If the path is already valid, we are done immediately. Otherwise, the path and any missing paths in its closure may be produced through substitutes. If there are no (successful) substitutes, realisation fails.

The output path of each derivation is printed on standard output. (For non-derivations argument, the argument itself is printed.)

The following flags are available:

• --dry-run
  Print on standard error a description of what packages would be built or downloaded, without actually performing the operation.

• --ignore-unknown
  If a non-derivation path does not have a substitute, then silently ignore it.

• --check
  This option allows you to check whether a derivation is deterministic. It rebuilds the specified derivation and checks whether the result is bitwise-identical with the existing outputs, printing an error if that’s not the case. The outputs of the specified derivation must already exist. When used with -K, if an output path is not identical to the corresponding output from the previous build, the new output path is left in /nix/store/name.check.

Special exit codes:

• 100
  Generic build failure, the builder process returned with a non-zero exit code.

• 101
  Build timeout, the build was aborted because it did not complete within the specified timeout.

• 102
  Hash mismatch, the build output was rejected because it does not match the outputHash attribute of the derivation.

• 104
  Not deterministic, the build succeeded in check mode but the resulting output is not binary reproducible.

With the --keep-going flag it's possible for multiple failures to occur, in this case the 1xx status codes are or combined using binary or.

1100100
   ^^^^
   |||`- timeout
   ||`-- output hash mismatch
   |`--- build failure
   `---- not deterministic

Examples

This operation is typically used to build store derivations produced by nix-instantiate:

$ nix-store -r $(nix-instantiate ./test.nix)
/nix/store/31axcgrlbfsxzmfff1gyj1bf62hvkby2-aterm-2.3.1

This is essentially what nix-build does.

To test whether a previously-built derivation is deterministic:

$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A hello --check -K

Use --read-log to show the stderr and stdout of a build:

$ nix-store --read-log $(nix-instantiate ./test.nix)

Operation --serve

Synopsis

nix-store --serve [--write]

Description

The operation --serve provides access to the Nix store over stdin and stdout, and is intended to be used as a means of providing Nix store access to a restricted ssh user.

The following flags are available:

• --write
  Allow the connected client to request the realization of derivations. In effect, this can be used to make the host act as a remote builder.

Examples

To turn a host into a build server, the authorized_keys file can be used to provide build access to a given SSH public key:

$ cat <<EOF >>/root/.ssh/authorized_keys
command="nice -n20 nix-store --serve --write" ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAA...
EOF

Operation --gc

Synopsis

nix-store --gc [--print-roots | --print-live | --print-dead] [--max-freed bytes]

Description

Without additional flags, the operation --gc performs a garbage collection on the Nix store. That is, all paths in the Nix store not reachable via file system references from a set of “roots”, are deleted.

The following suboperations may be specified:

• --print-roots
  This operation prints on standard output the set of roots used by the garbage collector.

• --print-live
  This operation prints on standard output the set of “live” store paths, which are all the store paths reachable from the roots. Live paths should never be deleted, since that would break consistency — it would become possible that applications are installed that reference things that are no longer present in the store.

• --print-dead
  This operation prints out on standard output the set of “dead” store paths, which is just the opposite of the set of live paths: any path in the store that is not live (with respect to the roots) is dead.

By default, all unreachable paths are deleted. The following options control what gets deleted and in what order:

• --max-freed bytes
  Keep deleting paths until at least bytes bytes have been deleted, then stop. The argument bytes can be followed by the multiplicative suffix K, M, G or T, denoting KiB, MiB, GiB or TiB units.

The behaviour of the collector is also influenced by the keep-outputs and keep-derivations settings in the Nix configuration file.

By default, the collector prints the total number of freed bytes when it finishes (or when it is interrupted). With --print-dead, it prints the number of bytes that would be freed.

Examples

To delete all unreachable paths, just do:

$ nix-store --gc
deleting `/nix/store/kq82idx6g0nyzsp2s14gfsc38npai7lf-cairo-1.0.4.tar.gz.drv'
...
8825586 bytes freed (8.42 MiB)

To delete at least 100 MiBs of unreachable paths:

$ nix-store --gc --max-freed $((100 * 1024 * 1024))

Operation --delete

Synopsis

nix-store --delete [--ignore-liveness] paths…

Description

The operation --delete deletes the store paths paths from the Nix store, but only if it is safe to do so; that is, when the path is not reachable from a root of the garbage collector. This means that you can only delete paths that would also be deleted by nix-store --gc. Thus, --delete is a more targeted version of --gc.

With the option --ignore-liveness, reachability from the roots is ignored. However, the path still won’t be deleted if there are other paths in the store that refer to it (i.e., depend on it).

Example

$ nix-store --delete /nix/store/zq0h41l75vlb4z45kzgjjmsjxvcv1qk7-mesa-6.4
0 bytes freed (0.00 MiB)
error: cannot delete path `/nix/store/zq0h41l75vlb4z45kzgjjmsjxvcv1qk7-mesa-6.4' since it is still alive

Operation --query

Synopsis

nix-store {--query | -q} {--outputs | --requisites | -R | --references | --referrers | --referrers-closure | --deriver | -d | --graph | --tree | --binding name | -b name | --hash | --size | --roots} [--use-output] [-u] [--force-realise] [-f] paths…

Description

The operation --query displays various bits of information about the store paths . The queries are described below. At most one query can be specified. The default query is --outputs.

The paths paths may also be symlinks from outside of the Nix store, to the Nix store. In that case, the query is applied to the target of the symlink.

Common query options

• --use-output; -u
  For each argument to the query that is a store derivation, apply the query to the output path of the derivation instead.

• --force-realise; -f
  Realise each argument to the query first (see nix-store --realise).

Queries

• --outputs
  Prints out the output paths of the store derivations paths. These are the paths that will be produced when the derivation is built.

• --requisites; -R
  Prints out the closure of the store path paths.

  This query has one option:

  • --include-outputs Also include the existing output paths of store derivations, and their closures.

  This query can be used to implement various kinds of deployment. A source deployment is obtained by distributing the closure of a store derivation. A binary deployment is obtained by distributing the closure of an output path. A cache deployment (combined source/binary deployment, including binaries of build-time-only dependencies) is obtained by distributing the closure of a store derivation and specifying the option --include-outputs.

• --references
  Prints the set of references of the store paths paths, that is, their immediate dependencies. (For all dependencies, use --requisites.)

• --referrers
  Prints the set of referrers of the store paths paths, that is, the store paths currently existing in the Nix store that refer to one of paths. Note that contrary to the references, the set of referrers is not constant; it can change as store paths are added or removed.

• --referrers-closure
  Prints the closure of the set of store paths paths under the referrers relation; that is, all store paths that directly or indirectly refer to one of paths. These are all the path currently in the Nix store that are dependent on paths.

• --deriver; -d
  Prints the deriver of the store paths paths. If the path has no deriver (e.g., if it is a source file), or if the deriver is not known (e.g., in the case of a binary-only deployment), the string unknown-deriver is printed.

• --graph
  Prints the references graph of the store paths paths in the format of the dot tool of AT&T's Graphviz package. This can be used to visualise dependency graphs. To obtain a build-time dependency graph, apply this to a store derivation. To obtain a runtime dependency graph, apply it to an output path.

• --tree
  Prints the references graph of the store paths paths as a nested ASCII tree. References are ordered by descending closure size; this tends to flatten the tree, making it more readable. The query only recurses into a store path when it is first encountered; this prevents a blowup of the tree representation of the graph.

• --graphml
  Prints the references graph of the store paths paths in the GraphML file format. This can be used to visualise dependency graphs. To obtain a build-time dependency graph, apply this to a store derivation. To obtain a runtime dependency graph, apply it to an output path.

• --binding name; -b name
  Prints the value of the attribute name (i.e., environment variable) of the store derivations paths. It is an error for a derivation to not have the specified attribute.

• --hash
  Prints the SHA-256 hash of the contents of the store paths paths (that is, the hash of the output of nix-store --dump on the given paths). Since the hash is stored in the Nix database, this is a fast operation.

• --size
  Prints the size in bytes of the contents of the store paths paths — to be precise, the size of the output of nix-store --dump on the given paths. Note that the actual disk space required by the store paths may be higher, especially on filesystems with large cluster sizes.

• --roots
  Prints the garbage collector roots that point, directly or indirectly, at the store paths paths.

Examples

Print the closure (runtime dependencies) of the svn program in the current user environment:

$ nix-store -qR $(which svn)
/nix/store/5mbglq5ldqld8sj57273aljwkfvj22mc-subversion-1.1.4
/nix/store/9lz9yc6zgmc0vlqmn2ipcpkjlmbi51vv-glibc-2.3.4
...

Print the build-time dependencies of svn:

$ nix-store -qR $(nix-store -qd $(which svn))
/nix/store/02iizgn86m42q905rddvg4ja975bk2i4-grep-2.5.1.tar.bz2.drv
/nix/store/07a2bzxmzwz5hp58nf03pahrv2ygwgs3-gcc-wrapper.sh
/nix/store/0ma7c9wsbaxahwwl04gbw3fcd806ski4-glibc-2.3.4.drv
... lots of other paths ...

The difference with the previous example is that we ask the closure of the derivation (-qd), not the closure of the output path that contains svn.

Show the build-time dependencies as a tree:

$ nix-store -q --tree $(nix-store -qd $(which svn))
/nix/store/7i5082kfb6yjbqdbiwdhhza0am2xvh6c-subversion-1.1.4.drv
+---/nix/store/d8afh10z72n8l1cr5w42366abiblgn54-builder.sh
+---/nix/store/fmzxmpjx2lh849ph0l36snfj9zdibw67-bash-3.0.drv
|   +---/nix/store/570hmhmx3v57605cqg9yfvvyh0nnb8k8-bash
|   +---/nix/store/p3srsbd8dx44v2pg6nbnszab5mcwx03v-builder.sh
...

Show all paths that depend on the same OpenSSL library as svn:

$ nix-store -q --referrers $(nix-store -q --binding openssl $(nix-store -qd $(which svn)))
/nix/store/23ny9l9wixx21632y2wi4p585qhva1q8-sylpheed-1.0.0
/nix/store/5mbglq5ldqld8sj57273aljwkfvj22mc-subversion-1.1.4
/nix/store/dpmvp969yhdqs7lm2r1a3gng7pyq6vy4-subversion-1.1.3
/nix/store/l51240xqsgg8a7yrbqdx1rfzyv6l26fx-lynx-2.8.5

Show all paths that directly or indirectly depend on the Glibc (C library) used by svn:

$ nix-store -q --referrers-closure $(ldd $(which svn) | grep /libc.so | awk '{print $3}')
/nix/store/034a6h4vpz9kds5r6kzb9lhh81mscw43-libgnomeprintui-2.8.2
/nix/store/15l3yi0d45prm7a82pcrknxdh6nzmxza-gawk-3.1.4
...

Note that ldd is a command that prints out the dynamic libraries used by an ELF executable.

Make a picture of the runtime dependency graph of the current user environment:

$ nix-store -q --graph ~/.nix-profile | dot -Tps > graph.ps
$ gv graph.ps

Show every garbage collector root that points to a store path that depends on svn:

$ nix-store -q --roots $(which svn)
/nix/var/nix/profiles/default-81-link
/nix/var/nix/profiles/default-82-link
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/eelco/profile-97-link

Operation --add

Synopsis

nix-store --add paths…

Description

The operation --add adds the specified paths to the Nix store. It prints the resulting paths in the Nix store on standard output.

Example

$ nix-store --add ./foo.c
/nix/store/m7lrha58ph6rcnv109yzx1nk1cj7k7zf-foo.c

Operation --add-fixed

Synopsis

nix-store --add-fixed [--recursive] algorithm paths…

Description

The operation --add-fixed adds the specified paths to the Nix store. Unlike --add paths are registered using the specified hashing algorithm, resulting in the same output path as a fixed-output derivation. This can be used for sources that are not available from a public url or broke since the download expression was written.

This operation has the following options:

• --recursive
  Use recursive instead of flat hashing mode, used when adding directories to the store.

Example

$ nix-store --add-fixed sha256 ./hello-2.10.tar.gz
/nix/store/3x7dwzq014bblazs7kq20p9hyzz0qh8g-hello-2.10.tar.gz

Operation --verify

Synopsis

nix-store --verify [--check-contents] [--repair]

Description

The operation --verify verifies the internal consistency of the Nix database, and the consistency between the Nix database and the Nix store. Any inconsistencies encountered are automatically repaired. Inconsistencies are generally the result of the Nix store or database being modified by non-Nix tools, or of bugs in Nix itself.

This operation has the following options:

• --check-contents
  Checks that the contents of every valid store path has not been altered by computing a SHA-256 hash of the contents and comparing it with the hash stored in the Nix database at build time. Paths that have been modified are printed out. For large stores, --check-contents is obviously quite slow.

• --repair
  If any valid path is missing from the store, or (if --check-contents is given) the contents of a valid path has been modified, then try to repair the path by redownloading it. See nix-store --repair-path for details.

Operation --verify-path

Synopsis

nix-store --verify-path paths…

Description

The operation --verify-path compares the contents of the given store paths to their cryptographic hashes stored in Nix’s database. For every changed path, it prints a warning message. The exit status is 0 if no path has changed, and 1 otherwise.

Example

To verify the integrity of the svn command and all its dependencies:

$ nix-store --verify-path $(nix-store -qR $(which svn))

Operation --repair-path

Synopsis

nix-store --repair-path paths…

Description

The operation --repair-path attempts to “repair” the specified paths by redownloading them using the available substituters. If no substitutes are available, then repair is not possible.

Warning

During repair, there is a very small time window during which the old path (if it exists) is moved out of the way and replaced with the new path. If repair is interrupted in between, then the system may be left in a broken state (e.g., if the path contains a critical system component like the GNU C Library).

Example

$ nix-store --verify-path /nix/store/dj7a81wsm1ijwwpkks3725661h3263p5-glibc-2.13
path `/nix/store/dj7a81wsm1ijwwpkks3725661h3263p5-glibc-2.13' was modified!
  expected hash `2db57715ae90b7e31ff1f2ecb8c12ec1cc43da920efcbe3b22763f36a1861588',
  got `481c5aa5483ebc97c20457bb8bca24deea56550d3985cda0027f67fe54b808e4'

$ nix-store --repair-path /nix/store/dj7a81wsm1ijwwpkks3725661h3263p5-glibc-2.13
fetching path `/nix/store/d7a81wsm1ijwwpkks3725661h3263p5-glibc-2.13'...
…

Operation --dump

Synopsis

nix-store --dump path

Description

The operation --dump produces a NAR (Nix ARchive) file containing the contents of the file system tree rooted at path. The archive is written to standard output.

A NAR archive is like a TAR or Zip archive, but it contains only the information that Nix considers important. For instance, timestamps are elided because all files in the Nix store have their timestamp set to 0 anyway. Likewise, all permissions are left out except for the execute bit, because all files in the Nix store have 444 or 555 permission.

Also, a NAR archive is canonical, meaning that “equal” paths always produce the same NAR archive. For instance, directory entries are always sorted so that the actual on-disk order doesn’t influence the result. This means that the cryptographic hash of a NAR dump of a path is usable as a fingerprint of the contents of the path. Indeed, the hashes of store paths stored in Nix’s database (see nix-store -q --hash) are SHA-256 hashes of the NAR dump of each store path.

NAR archives support filenames of unlimited length and 64-bit file sizes. They can contain regular files, directories, and symbolic links, but not other types of files (such as device nodes).

A Nix archive can be unpacked using nix-store --restore.

Operation --restore

Synopsis

nix-store --restore path

Description

The operation --restore unpacks a NAR archive to path, which must not already exist. The archive is read from standard input.

Operation --export

Synopsis

nix-store --export paths…

Description

The operation --export writes a serialisation of the specified store paths to standard output in a format that can be imported into another Nix store with nix-store --import. This is like nix-store --dump, except that the NAR archive produced by that command doesn’t contain the necessary meta-information to allow it to be imported into another Nix store (namely, the set of references of the path).

This command does not produce a closure of the specified paths, so if a store path references other store paths that are missing in the target Nix store, the import will fail. To copy a whole closure, do something like:

$ nix-store --export $(nix-store -qR paths) > out

To import the whole closure again, run:

$ nix-store --import < out

Operation --import

Synopsis

nix-store --import

Description

The operation --import reads a serialisation of a set of store paths produced by nix-store --export from standard input and adds those store paths to the Nix store. Paths that already exist in the Nix store are ignored. If a path refers to another path that doesn’t exist in the Nix store, the import fails.

Operation --optimise

Synopsis

nix-store --optimise

Description

The operation --optimise reduces Nix store disk space usage by finding identical files in the store and hard-linking them to each other. It typically reduces the size of the store by something like 25-35%. Only regular files and symlinks are hard-linked in this manner. Files are considered identical when they have the same NAR archive serialisation: that is, regular files must have the same contents and permission (executable or non-executable), and symlinks must have the same contents.

After completion, or when the command is interrupted, a report on the achieved savings is printed on standard error.

Use -vv or -vvv to get some progress indication.

Example

$ nix-store --optimise
hashing files in `/nix/store/qhqx7l2f1kmwihc9bnxs7rc159hsxnf3-gcc-4.1.1'
...
541838819 bytes (516.74 MiB) freed by hard-linking 54143 files;
there are 114486 files with equal contents out of 215894 files in total

Operation --read-log

Synopsis

nix-store {--read-log | -l} paths…

Description

The operation --read-log prints the build log of the specified store paths on standard output. The build log is whatever the builder of a derivation wrote to standard output and standard error. If a store path is not a derivation, the deriver of the store path is used.

Build logs are kept in /nix/var/log/nix/drvs. However, there is no guarantee that a build log is available for any particular store path. For instance, if the path was downloaded as a pre-built binary through a substitute, then the log is unavailable.

Example

$ nix-store -l $(which ktorrent)
building /nix/store/dhc73pvzpnzxhdgpimsd9sw39di66ph1-ktorrent-2.2.1
unpacking sources
unpacking source archive /nix/store/p8n1jpqs27mgkjw07pb5269717nzf5f8-ktorrent-2.2.1.tar.gz
ktorrent-2.2.1/
ktorrent-2.2.1/NEWS
...

Operation --dump-db

Synopsis

nix-store --dump-db [paths…]

Description

The operation --dump-db writes a dump of the Nix database to standard output. It can be loaded into an empty Nix store using --load-db. This is useful for making backups and when migrating to different database schemas.

By default, --dump-db will dump the entire Nix database. When one or more store paths is passed, only the subset of the Nix database for those store paths is dumped. As with --export, the user is responsible for passing all the store paths for a closure. See --export for an example.

Operation --load-db

Synopsis

nix-store --load-db

Description

The operation --load-db reads a dump of the Nix database created by --dump-db from standard input and loads it into the Nix database.

Operation --print-env

Synopsis

nix-store --print-env drvpath

Description

The operation --print-env prints out the environment of a derivation in a format that can be evaluated by a shell. The command line arguments of the builder are placed in the variable _args.

Example

$ nix-store --print-env $(nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs>' -A firefox)
…
export src; src='/nix/store/plpj7qrwcz94z2psh6fchsi7s8yihc7k-firefox-12.0.source.tar.bz2'
export stdenv; stdenv='/nix/store/7c8asx3yfrg5dg1gzhzyq2236zfgibnn-stdenv'
export system; system='x86_64-linux'
export _args; _args='-e /nix/store/9krlzvny65gdc8s7kpb6lkx8cd02c25c-default-builder.sh'

Operation --generate-binary-cache-key

Synopsis

nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key key-name secret-key-file public-key-file

Description

This command generates an Ed25519 key pair that can be used to create a signed binary cache. It takes three mandatory parameters:

1. A key name, such as cache.example.org-1, that is used to look up keys on the client when it verifies signatures. It can be anything, but it’s suggested to use the host name of your cache (e.g. cache.example.org) with a suffix denoting the number of the key (to be incremented every time you need to revoke a key).

2. The file name where the secret key is to be stored.

3. The file name where the public key is to be stored.

Utilities

This section lists utilities that you can use when you work with Nix.

Name

nix-channel - manage Nix channels

Synopsis

nix-channel {--add url [name] | --remove name | --list | --update [names…] | --rollback [generation] }

Description

A Nix channel is a mechanism that allows you to automatically stay up-to-date with a set of pre-built Nix expressions. A Nix channel is just a URL that points to a place containing a set of Nix expressions.

To see the list of official NixOS channels, visit https://nixos.org/channels.

This command has the following operations:

• --add url [name]
  Adds a channel named name with URL url to the list of subscribed channels. If name is omitted, it defaults to the last component of url, with the suffixes -stable or -unstable removed.

• --remove name
  Removes the channel named name from the list of subscribed channels.

• --list
  Prints the names and URLs of all subscribed channels on standard output.

• --update [names…]
  Downloads the Nix expressions of all subscribed channels (or only those included in names if specified) and makes them the default for nix-env operations (by symlinking them from the directory ~/.nix-defexpr).

• --rollback [generation]
  Reverts the previous call to nix-channel --update. Optionally, you can specify a specific channel generation number to restore.

Note that --add does not automatically perform an update.

The list of subscribed channels is stored in ~/.nix-channels.

Examples

To subscribe to the Nixpkgs channel and install the GNU Hello package:

$ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
$ nix-channel --update
$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hello

You can revert channel updates using --rollback:

$ nix-instantiate --eval -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version'
"14.04.527.0e935f1"

$ nix-channel --rollback
switching from generation 483 to 482

$ nix-instantiate --eval -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version'
"14.04.526.dbadfad"

Files

• /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/username/channels
nix-channel uses a nix-env profile to keep track of previous versions of the subscribed channels. Every time you run nix-channel --update, a new channel generation (that is, a symlink to the channel Nix expressions in the Nix store) is created. This enables nix-channel --rollback to revert to previous versions.

• ~/.nix-defexpr/channels
  This is a symlink to /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/username/channels. It ensures that nix-env can find your channels. In a multi-user installation, you may also have ~/.nix-defexpr/channels_root, which links to the channels of the root user.

Channel format

A channel URL should point to a directory containing the following files:

• nixexprs.tar.xz
  A tarball containing Nix expressions and files referenced by them (such as build scripts and patches). At the top level, the tarball should contain a single directory. That directory must contain a file default.nix that serves as the channel’s “entry point”.

Name

nix-collect-garbage - delete unreachable store paths

Synopsis

nix-collect-garbage [--delete-old] [-d] [--delete-older-than period] [--max-freed bytes] [--dry-run]

Description

The command nix-collect-garbage is mostly an alias of nix-store --gc, that is, it deletes all unreachable paths in the Nix store to clean up your system. However, it provides two additional options: -d (--delete-old), which deletes all old generations of all profiles in /nix/var/nix/profiles by invoking nix-env --delete-generations old on all profiles (of course, this makes rollbacks to previous configurations impossible); and --delete-older-than period, where period is a value such as 30d, which deletes all generations older than the specified number of days in all profiles in /nix/var/nix/profiles (except for the generations that were active at that point in time).

Example

To delete from the Nix store everything that is not used by the current generations of each profile, do

$ nix-collect-garbage -d

Name

nix-copy-closure - copy a closure to or from a remote machine via SSH

Synopsis

nix-copy-closure [--to | --from] [--gzip] [--include-outputs] [--use-substitutes | -s] [-v] user@machine paths

Description

nix-copy-closure gives you an easy and efficient way to exchange software between machines. Given one or more Nix store paths on the local machine, nix-copy-closure computes the closure of those paths (i.e. all their dependencies in the Nix store), and copies all paths in the closure to the remote machine via the ssh (Secure Shell) command. With the --from option, the direction is reversed: the closure of paths on a remote machine is copied to the Nix store on the local machine.

This command is efficient because it only sends the store paths that are missing on the target machine.

Since nix-copy-closure calls ssh, you may be asked to type in the appropriate password or passphrase. In fact, you may be asked twice because nix-copy-closure currently connects twice to the remote machine, first to get the set of paths missing on the target machine, and second to send the dump of those paths. When using public key authentication, you can avoid typing the passphrase with ssh-agent.

Options

• --to
  Copy the closure of paths from the local Nix store to the Nix store on machine. This is the default.

• --from
  Copy the closure of paths from the Nix store on machine to the local Nix store.

• --gzip
  Enable compression of the SSH connection.

• --include-outputs
  Also copy the outputs of store derivations included in the closure.

• --use-substitutes / -s
  Attempt to download missing paths on the target machine using Nix’s substitute mechanism. Any paths that cannot be substituted on the target are still copied normally from the source. This is useful, for instance, if the connection between the source and target machine is slow, but the connection between the target machine and nixos.org (the default binary cache server) is fast.

• -v
  Show verbose output.

Environment variables

• NIX_SSHOPTS
  Additional options to be passed to ssh on the command line.

Examples

Copy Firefox with all its dependencies to a remote machine:

$ nix-copy-closure --to alice@itchy.labs $(type -tP firefox)

Copy Subversion from a remote machine and then install it into a user environment:

$ nix-copy-closure --from alice@itchy.labs \
    /nix/store/0dj0503hjxy5mbwlafv1rsbdiyx1gkdy-subversion-1.4.4
$ nix-env -i /nix/store/0dj0503hjxy5mbwlafv1rsbdiyx1gkdy-subversion-1.4.4

Name

nix-daemon - Nix multi-user support daemon

Synopsis

nix-daemon

Description

The Nix daemon is necessary in multi-user Nix installations. It runs build tasks and other operations on the Nix store on behalf of unprivileged users.

Name

nix-hash - compute the cryptographic hash of a path

Synopsis

nix-hash [--flat] [--base32] [--truncate] [--type hashAlgo] path…

nix-hash --to-base16 hash…

nix-hash --to-base32 hash…

Description

The command nix-hash computes the cryptographic hash of the contents of each path and prints it on standard output. By default, it computes an MD5 hash, but other hash algorithms are available as well. The hash is printed in hexadecimal. To generate the same hash as nix-prefetch-url you have to specify multiple arguments, see below for an example.

The hash is computed over a serialisation of each path: a dump of the file system tree rooted at the path. This allows directories and symlinks to be hashed as well as regular files. The dump is in the NAR format produced by nix-store --dump. Thus, nix-hash path yields the same cryptographic hash as nix-store --dump path | md5sum.

Options

• --flat
  Print the cryptographic hash of the contents of each regular file path. That is, do not compute the hash over the dump of path. The result is identical to that produced by the GNU commands md5sum and sha1sum.

• --base32
  Print the hash in a base-32 representation rather than hexadecimal. This base-32 representation is more compact and can be used in Nix expressions (such as in calls to fetchurl).

• --truncate
  Truncate hashes longer than 160 bits (such as SHA-256) to 160 bits.

• --type hashAlgo
  Use the specified cryptographic hash algorithm, which can be one of md5, sha1, sha256, and sha512.

• --to-base16
  Don’t hash anything, but convert the base-32 hash representation hash to hexadecimal.

• --to-base32
  Don’t hash anything, but convert the hexadecimal hash representation hash to base-32.

Examples

Computing the same hash as nix-prefetch-url:

$ nix-prefetch-url file://<(echo test)
1lkgqb6fclns49861dwk9rzb6xnfkxbpws74mxnx01z9qyv1pjpj
$ nix-hash --type sha256 --flat --base32 <(echo test)
1lkgqb6fclns49861dwk9rzb6xnfkxbpws74mxnx01z9qyv1pjpj

Computing hashes:

$ mkdir test
$ echo "hello" > test/world

$ nix-hash test/ (MD5 hash; default)
8179d3caeff1869b5ba1744e5a245c04

$ nix-store --dump test/ | md5sum (for comparison)
8179d3caeff1869b5ba1744e5a245c04  -

$ nix-hash --type sha1 test/
e4fd8ba5f7bbeaea5ace89fe10255536cd60dab6

$ nix-hash --type sha1 --base32 test/
nvd61k9nalji1zl9rrdfmsmvyyjqpzg4

$ nix-hash --type sha256 --flat test/
error: reading file `test/': Is a directory

$ nix-hash --type sha256 --flat test/world
5891b5b522d5df086d0ff0b110fbd9d21bb4fc7163af34d08286a2e846f6be03

Converting between hexadecimal and base-32:

$ nix-hash --type sha1 --to-base32 e4fd8ba5f7bbeaea5ace89fe10255536cd60dab6
nvd61k9nalji1zl9rrdfmsmvyyjqpzg4

$ nix-hash --type sha1 --to-base16 nvd61k9nalji1zl9rrdfmsmvyyjqpzg4
e4fd8ba5f7bbeaea5ace89fe10255536cd60dab6

Name

nix-instantiate - instantiate store derivations from Nix expressions

Synopsis

nix-instantiate [--parse | --eval [--strict] [--json] [--xml] ] [--read-write-mode] [--arg name value] [{--attr| -A} attrPath] [--add-root path] [--expr | -E] files…

nix-instantiate --find-file files…

Description

The command nix-instantiate produces store derivations from (high-level) Nix expressions. It evaluates the Nix expressions in each of files (which defaults to ./default.nix). Each top-level expression should evaluate to a derivation, a list of derivations, or a set of derivations. The paths of the resulting store derivations are printed on standard output.

If files is the character -, then a Nix expression will be read from standard input.

Options

• --add-root path
  See the corresponding option in nix-store.

• --parse
  Just parse the input files, and print their abstract syntax trees on standard output in ATerm format.

• --eval
  Just parse and evaluate the input files, and print the resulting values on standard output. No instantiation of store derivations takes place.

• --find-file
  Look up the given files in Nix’s search path (as specified by the NIX_PATH environment variable). If found, print the corresponding absolute paths on standard output. For instance, if NIX_PATH is nixpkgs=/home/alice/nixpkgs, then nix-instantiate --find-file nixpkgs/default.nix will print /home/alice/nixpkgs/default.nix.

• --strict
  When used with --eval, recursively evaluate list elements and attributes. Normally, such sub-expressions are left unevaluated (since the Nix language is lazy).

  Warning

  This option can cause non-termination, because lazy data structures can be infinitely large.

• --json
  When used with --eval, print the resulting value as an JSON representation of the abstract syntax tree rather than as an ATerm.

• --xml
  When used with --eval, print the resulting value as an XML representation of the abstract syntax tree rather than as an ATerm. The schema is the same as that used by the toXML built-in.

• --read-write-mode
  When used with --eval, perform evaluation in read/write mode so nix language features that require it will still work (at the cost of needing to do instantiation of every evaluated derivation). If this option is not enabled, there may be uninstantiated store paths in the final output.

Examples

Instantiate store derivations from a Nix expression, and build them using nix-store:

$ nix-instantiate test.nix (instantiate)
/nix/store/cigxbmvy6dzix98dxxh9b6shg7ar5bvs-perl-BerkeleyDB-0.26.drv

$ nix-store -r $(nix-instantiate test.nix) (build)
...
/nix/store/qhqk4n8ci095g3sdp93x7rgwyh9rdvgk-perl-BerkeleyDB-0.26 (output path)

$ ls -l /nix/store/qhqk4n8ci095g3sdp93x7rgwyh9rdvgk-perl-BerkeleyDB-0.26
dr-xr-xr-x    2 eelco    users        4096 1970-01-01 01:00 lib
...

You can also give a Nix expression on the command line:

$ nix-instantiate -E 'with import <nixpkgs> { }; hello'
/nix/store/j8s4zyv75a724q38cb0r87rlczaiag4y-hello-2.8.drv

This is equivalent to:

$ nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs>' -A hello

Parsing and evaluating Nix expressions:

$ nix-instantiate --parse -E '1 + 2'
1 + 2

$ nix-instantiate --eval -E '1 + 2'
3

$ nix-instantiate --eval --xml -E '1 + 2'
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<expr>
  <int value="3" />
</expr>

The difference between non-strict and strict evaluation:

$ nix-instantiate --eval --xml -E 'rec { x = "foo"; y = x; }'
...
  <attr name="x">
    <string value="foo" />
  </attr>
  <attr name="y">
    <unevaluated />
  </attr>
...

Note that y is left unevaluated (the XML representation doesn’t attempt to show non-normal forms).

$ nix-instantiate --eval --xml --strict -E 'rec { x = "foo"; y = x; }'
...
  <attr name="x">
    <string value="foo" />
  </attr>
  <attr name="y">
    <string value="foo" />
  </attr>
...

Name

nix-prefetch-url - copy a file from a URL into the store and print its hash

Synopsis

nix-prefetch-url url [hash] [--type hashAlgo] [--print-path] [--unpack] [--name name]

Description

The command nix-prefetch-url downloads the file referenced by the URL url, prints its cryptographic hash, and copies it into the Nix store. The file name in the store is hash-baseName, where baseName is everything following the final slash in url.

This command is just a convenience for Nix expression writers. Often a Nix expression fetches some source distribution from the network using the fetchurl expression contained in Nixpkgs. However, fetchurl requires a cryptographic hash. If you don't know the hash, you would have to download the file first, and then fetchurl would download it again when you build your Nix expression. Since fetchurl uses the same name for the downloaded file as nix-prefetch-url, the redundant download can be avoided.

If hash is specified, then a download is not performed if the Nix store already contains a file with the same hash and base name. Otherwise, the file is downloaded, and an error is signaled if the actual hash of the file does not match the specified hash.

This command prints the hash on standard output. Additionally, if the option --print-path is used, the path of the downloaded file in the Nix store is also printed.

Options

• --type hashAlgo
  Use the specified cryptographic hash algorithm, which can be one of md5, sha1, sha256, and sha512.

• --print-path
  Print the store path of the downloaded file on standard output.

• --unpack
  Unpack the archive (which must be a tarball or zip file) and add the result to the Nix store. The resulting hash can be used with functions such as Nixpkgs’s fetchzip or fetchFromGitHub.

• --executable
  Set the executable bit on the downloaded file.

• --name name
  Override the name of the file in the Nix store. By default, this is hash-basename, where basename is the last component of url. Overriding the name is necessary when basename contains characters that are not allowed in Nix store paths.

Examples

$ nix-prefetch-url ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz
0ssi1wpaf7plaswqqjwigppsg5fyh99vdlb9kzl7c9lng89ndq1i

$ nix-prefetch-url --print-path mirror://gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz
0ssi1wpaf7plaswqqjwigppsg5fyh99vdlb9kzl7c9lng89ndq1i
/nix/store/3x7dwzq014bblazs7kq20p9hyzz0qh8g-hello-2.10.tar.gz

$ nix-prefetch-url --unpack --print-path https://github.com/NixOS/patchelf/archive/0.8.tar.gz
079agjlv0hrv7fxnx9ngipx14gyncbkllxrp9cccnh3a50fxcmy7
/nix/store/19zrmhm3m40xxaw81c8cqm6aljgrnwj2-0.8.tar.gz

Experimental Commands

This section lists experimental commands.

Warning

These commands may be removed in the future, or their syntax may change in incompatible ways.

Warning
This program is experimental and its interface is subject to change.

Name

nix - a tool for reproducible and declarative configuration management

Synopsis

nix [option...] subcommand

where subcommand is one of the following:

Main commands:

• nix build - build a derivation or fetch a store path
• nix develop - run a bash shell that provides the build environment of a derivation
• nix flake - manage Nix flakes
• nix help - show help about nix or a particular subcommand
• nix profile - manage Nix profiles
• nix repl - start an interactive environment for evaluating Nix expressions
• nix run - run a Nix application
• nix search - search for packages
• nix shell - run a shell in which the specified packages are available

Infrequently used commands:

• nix bundle - bundle an application so that it works outside of the Nix store
• nix copy - copy paths between Nix stores
• nix edit - open the Nix expression of a Nix package in $EDITOR
• nix eval - evaluate a Nix expression
• nix fmt - reformat your code in the standard style
• nix log - show the build log of the specified packages or paths, if available
• nix path-info - query information about store paths
• nix registry - manage the flake registry
• nix why-depends - show why a package has another package in its closure

Utility/scripting commands:

• nix daemon - daemon to perform store operations on behalf of non-root clients
• nix describe-stores - show registered store types and their available options
• nix hash - compute and convert cryptographic hashes
• nix key - generate and convert Nix signing keys
• nix nar - create or inspect NAR files
• nix print-dev-env - print shell code that can be sourced by bash to reproduce the build environment of a derivation
• nix realisation - manipulate a Nix realisation
• nix show-config - show the Nix configuration
• nix show-derivation - show the contents of a store derivation
• nix store - manipulate a Nix store

Commands for upgrading or troubleshooting your Nix installation:

• nix doctor - check your system for potential problems and print a PASS or FAIL for each check
• nix upgrade-nix - upgrade Nix to the stable version declared in Nixpkgs

Examples

• Create a new flake:

  # nix flake new hello
  # cd hello
  

• Build the flake in the current directory:

  # nix build
  # ./result/bin/hello
  Hello, world!
  

• Run the flake in the current directory:

  # nix run
  Hello, world!
  

• Start a development shell for hacking on this flake:

  # nix develop
  # unpackPhase
  # cd hello-*
  # configurePhase
  # buildPhase
  # ./hello
  Hello, world!
  # installPhase
  # ../outputs/out/bin/hello
  Hello, world!
  

Description

Nix is a tool for building software, configurations and other artifacts in a reproducible and declarative way. For more information, see the Nix homepage or the Nix manual.

Installables

Many nix subcommands operate on one or more installables. These are command line arguments that represent something that can be built in the Nix store. Here are the recognised types of installables:

• Flake output attributes: nixpkgs#hello

  These have the form flakeref[#attrpath], where flakeref is a flake reference and attrpath is an optional attribute path. For more information on flakes, see the nix flake manual page. Flake references are most commonly a flake identifier in the flake registry (e.g. nixpkgs), or a raw path (e.g. /path/to/my-flake or . or ../foo), or a full URL (e.g. github:nixos/nixpkgs or path:.)

  When the flake reference is a raw path (a path without any URL scheme), it is interpreted as a path: or git+file: url in the following way:

  • If the path is within a Git repository, then the url will be of the form git+file://[GIT_REPO_ROOT]?dir=[RELATIVE_FLAKE_DIR_PATH] where GIT_REPO_ROOT is the path to the root of the git repository, and RELATIVE_FLAKE_DIR_PATH is the path (relative to the directory root) of the closest parent of the given path that contains a flake.nix within the git repository. If no such directory exists, then Nix will error-out.

    Note that the search will only include files indexed by git. In particular, files which are matched by .gitignore or have never been git add-ed will not be available in the flake. If this is undesirable, specify path:<directory> explicitly;

    For example, if /foo/bar is a git repository with the following structure:

    .
    └── baz
        ├── blah
        │   └── file.txt
        └── flake.nix
    

  Then /foo/bar/baz/blah will resolve to git+file:///foo/bar?dir=baz

  • If the supplied path is not a git repository, then the url will have the form path:FLAKE_DIR_PATH where FLAKE_DIR_PATH is the closest parent of the supplied path that contains a flake.nix file (within the same file-system). If no such directory exists, then Nix will error-out.

    For example, if /foo/bar/flake.nix exists, then /foo/bar/baz/ will resolve to path:/foo/bar

  If attrpath is omitted, Nix tries some default values; for most subcommands, the default is packages.system.default (e.g. packages.x86_64-linux.default), but some subcommands have other defaults. If attrpath is specified, attrpath is interpreted as relative to one or more prefixes; for most subcommands, these are packages.system, legacyPackages.*system* and the empty prefix. Thus, on x86_64-linux nix build nixpkgs#hello will try to build the attributes packages.x86_64-linux.hello, legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.hello and hello.

• Store paths: /nix/store/v5sv61sszx301i0x6xysaqzla09nksnd-hello-2.10

  These are paths inside the Nix store, or symlinks that resolve to a path in the Nix store.

• Store derivations: /nix/store/p7gp6lxdg32h4ka1q398wd9r2zkbbz2v-hello-2.10.drv

  By default, if you pass a store derivation path to a nix subcommand, the command will operate on the output paths of the derivation.

  For example, nix path-info prints information about the output paths:

  # nix path-info --json /nix/store/p7gp6lxdg32h4ka1q398wd9r2zkbbz2v-hello-2.10.drv
  [{"path":"/nix/store/v5sv61sszx301i0x6xysaqzla09nksnd-hello-2.10",…}]
  

  If you want to operate on the store derivation itself, pass the --derivation flag.

• Nix attributes: --file /path/to/nixpkgs hello

  When the -f / --file path option is given, installables are interpreted as attribute paths referencing a value returned by evaluating the Nix file path.

• Nix expressions: --expr '(import <nixpkgs> {}).hello.overrideDerivation (prev: { name = "my-hello"; })'.

  When the --expr option is given, all installables are interpreted as Nix expressions. You may need to specify --impure if the expression references impure inputs (such as <nixpkgs>).

For most commands, if no installable is specified, the default is ., i.e. Nix will operate on the default flake output attribute of the flake in the current directory.

Derivation output selection

Derivations can have multiple outputs, each corresponding to a different store path. For instance, a package can have a bin output that contains programs, and a dev output that provides development artifacts like C/C++ header files. The outputs on which nix commands operate are determined as follows:

• You can explicitly specify the desired outputs using the syntax installable^output1,...,outputN. For example, you can obtain the dev and static outputs of the glibc package:

  # nix build 'nixpkgs#glibc^dev,static'
  # ls ./result-dev/include/ ./result-static/lib/
  …
  

  and likewise, using a store path to a "drv" file to specify the derivation:

  # nix build '/nix/store/gzaflydcr6sb3567hap9q6srzx8ggdgg-glibc-2.33-78.drv^dev,static'
  …
  

• You can also specify that all outputs should be used using the syntax installable^*. For example, the following shows the size of all outputs of the glibc package in the binary cache:

  # nix path-info -S --eval-store auto --store https://cache.nixos.org 'nixpkgs#glibc^*'
  /nix/store/g02b1lpbddhymmcjb923kf0l7s9nww58-glibc-2.33-123                 33208200
  /nix/store/851dp95qqiisjifi639r0zzg5l465ny4-glibc-2.33-123-bin             36142896
  /nix/store/kdgs3q6r7xdff1p7a9hnjr43xw2404z7-glibc-2.33-123-debug          155787312
  /nix/store/n4xa8h6pbmqmwnq0mmsz08l38abb06zc-glibc-2.33-123-static          42488328
  /nix/store/q6580lr01jpcsqs4r5arlh4ki2c1m9rv-glibc-2.33-123-dev             44200560
  

  and likewise, using a store path to a "drv" file to specify the derivation:

  # nix path-info -S '/nix/store/gzaflydcr6sb3567hap9q6srzx8ggdgg-glibc-2.33-78.drv^*'
  …
  

• If you didn't specify the desired outputs, but the derivation has an attribute meta.outputsToInstall, Nix will use those outputs. For example, since the package nixpkgs#libxml2 has this attribute:

  # nix eval 'nixpkgs#libxml2.meta.outputsToInstall'
  [ "bin" "man" ]
  

  a command like nix shell nixpkgs#libxml2 will provide only those two outputs by default.

  Note that a store derivation (given by its .drv file store path) doesn't have any attributes like meta, and thus this case doesn't apply to it.

• Otherwise, Nix will use all outputs of the derivation.

Nix stores

Most nix subcommands operate on a Nix store.

TODO: list store types, options

Options

Logging-related options:

• --debug

  Set the logging verbosity level to 'debug'.

• --log-format format

  Set the format of log output; one of raw, internal-json, bar or bar-with-logs.

• --print-build-logs / -L

  Print full build logs on standard error.

• --quiet

  Decrease the logging verbosity level.

• --verbose / -v

  Increase the logging verbosity level.

Miscellaneous global options:

• --help

  Show usage information.

• --offline

  Disable substituters and consider all previously downloaded files up-to-date.

• --option name value

  Set the Nix configuration setting name to value (overriding nix.conf).

• --refresh

  Consider all previously downloaded files out-of-date.

• --version

  Show version information.

Options to override configuration settings:

• --accept-flake-config

  Enable the accept-flake-config setting.

• --access-tokens value

  Set the access-tokens setting.

• --allow-dirty

  Enable the allow-dirty setting.

• --allow-import-from-derivation

  Enable the allow-import-from-derivation setting.

• --allow-new-privileges

  Enable the allow-new-privileges setting.

• --allow-symlinked-store

  Enable the allow-symlinked-store setting.

• --allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation

  Enable the allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation setting.

• --allowed-impure-host-deps value

  Set the allowed-impure-host-deps setting.

• --allowed-uris value

  Set the allowed-uris setting.

• --allowed-users value

  Set the allowed-users setting.

• --auto-allocate-uids

  Enable the auto-allocate-uids setting.

• --auto-optimise-store

  Enable the auto-optimise-store setting.

• --bash-prompt value

  Set the bash-prompt setting.

• --bash-prompt-prefix value

  Set the bash-prompt-prefix setting.

• --bash-prompt-suffix value

  Set the bash-prompt-suffix setting.

• --build-hook value

  Set the build-hook setting.

• --build-poll-interval value

  Set the build-poll-interval setting.

• --build-users-group value

  Set the build-users-group setting.

• --builders value

  Set the builders setting.

• --builders-use-substitutes

  Enable the builders-use-substitutes setting.

• --commit-lockfile-summary value

  Set the commit-lockfile-summary setting.

• --compress-build-log

  Enable the compress-build-log setting.

• --connect-timeout value

  Set the connect-timeout setting.

• --cores value

  Set the cores setting.

• --diff-hook value

  Set the diff-hook setting.

• --download-attempts value

  Set the download-attempts setting.

• --download-speed value

  Set the download-speed setting.

• --eval-cache

  Enable the eval-cache setting.

• --experimental-features value

  Set the experimental-features setting.

• --extra-access-tokens value

  Append to the access-tokens setting.

• --extra-allowed-impure-host-deps value

  Append to the allowed-impure-host-deps setting.

• --extra-allowed-uris value

  Append to the allowed-uris setting.

• --extra-allowed-users value

  Append to the allowed-users setting.

• --extra-experimental-features value

  Append to the experimental-features setting.

• --extra-extra-platforms value

  Append to the extra-platforms setting.

• --extra-hashed-mirrors value

  Append to the hashed-mirrors setting.

• --extra-ignored-acls value

  Append to the ignored-acls setting.

• --extra-nix-path value

  Append to the nix-path setting.

• --extra-platforms value

  Set the extra-platforms setting.

• --extra-plugin-files value

  Append to the plugin-files setting.

• --extra-sandbox-paths value

  Append to the sandbox-paths setting.

• --extra-secret-key-files value

  Append to the secret-key-files setting.

• --extra-substituters value

  Append to the substituters setting.

• --extra-system-features value

  Append to the system-features setting.

• --extra-trusted-public-keys value

  Append to the trusted-public-keys setting.

• --extra-trusted-substituters value

  Append to the trusted-substituters setting.

• --extra-trusted-users value

  Append to the trusted-users setting.

• --fallback

  Enable the fallback setting.

• --filter-syscalls

  Enable the filter-syscalls setting.

• --flake-registry value

  Set the flake-registry setting.

• --fsync-metadata

  Enable the fsync-metadata setting.

• --gc-reserved-space value

  Set the gc-reserved-space setting.

• --hashed-mirrors value

  Set the hashed-mirrors setting.

• --http-connections value

  Set the http-connections setting.

• --http2

  Enable the http2 setting.

• --id-count value

  Set the id-count setting.

• --ignore-try

  Enable the ignore-try setting.

• --ignored-acls value

  Set the ignored-acls setting.

• --impersonate-linux-26

  Enable the impersonate-linux-26 setting.

• --keep-build-log

  Enable the keep-build-log setting.

• --keep-derivations

  Enable the keep-derivations setting.

• --keep-env-derivations

  Enable the keep-env-derivations setting.

• --keep-failed

  Enable the keep-failed setting.

• --keep-going

  Enable the keep-going setting.

• --keep-outputs

  Enable the keep-outputs setting.

• --log-lines value

  Set the log-lines setting.

• --max-build-log-size value

  Set the max-build-log-size setting.

• --max-free value

  Set the max-free setting.

• --max-jobs value

  Set the max-jobs setting.

• --max-silent-time value

  Set the max-silent-time setting.

• --min-free value

  Set the min-free setting.

• --min-free-check-interval value

  Set the min-free-check-interval setting.

• --nar-buffer-size value

  Set the nar-buffer-size setting.

• --narinfo-cache-negative-ttl value

  Set the narinfo-cache-negative-ttl setting.

• --narinfo-cache-positive-ttl value

  Set the narinfo-cache-positive-ttl setting.

• --netrc-file value

  Set the netrc-file setting.

• --nix-path value

  Set the nix-path setting.

• --no-accept-flake-config

  Disable the accept-flake-config setting.

• --no-allow-dirty

  Disable the allow-dirty setting.

• --no-allow-import-from-derivation

  Disable the allow-import-from-derivation setting.

• --no-allow-new-privileges

  Disable the allow-new-privileges setting.

• --no-allow-symlinked-store

  Disable the allow-symlinked-store setting.

• --no-allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation

  Disable the allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation setting.

• --no-auto-allocate-uids

  Disable the auto-allocate-uids setting.

• --no-auto-optimise-store

  Disable the auto-optimise-store setting.

• --no-builders-use-substitutes

  Disable the builders-use-substitutes setting.

• --no-compress-build-log

  Disable the compress-build-log setting.

• --no-eval-cache

  Disable the eval-cache setting.

• --no-fallback

  Disable the fallback setting.

• --no-filter-syscalls

  Disable the filter-syscalls setting.

• --no-fsync-metadata

  Disable the fsync-metadata setting.

• --no-http2

  Disable the http2 setting.

• --no-ignore-try

  Disable the ignore-try setting.

• --no-impersonate-linux-26

  Disable the impersonate-linux-26 setting.

• --no-keep-build-log

  Disable the keep-build-log setting.

• --no-keep-derivations

  Disable the keep-derivations setting.

• --no-keep-env-derivations

  Disable the keep-env-derivations setting.

• --no-keep-failed

  Disable the keep-failed setting.

• --no-keep-going

  Disable the keep-going setting.

• --no-keep-outputs

  Disable the keep-outputs setting.

• --no-preallocate-contents

  Disable the preallocate-contents setting.

• --no-print-missing

  Disable the print-missing setting.

• --no-pure-eval

  Disable the pure-eval setting.

• --no-require-sigs

  Disable the require-sigs setting.

• --no-restrict-eval

  Disable the restrict-eval setting.

• --no-run-diff-hook

  Disable the run-diff-hook setting.

• --no-sandbox

  Disable sandboxing.

• --no-sandbox-fallback

  Disable the sandbox-fallback setting.

• --no-show-trace

  Disable the show-trace setting.

• --no-substitute

  Disable the substitute setting.

• --no-sync-before-registering

  Disable the sync-before-registering setting.

• --no-trace-function-calls

  Disable the trace-function-calls setting.

• --no-trace-verbose

  Disable the trace-verbose setting.

• --no-use-case-hack

  Disable the use-case-hack setting.

• --no-use-cgroups

  Disable the use-cgroups setting.

• --no-use-registries

  Disable the use-registries setting.

• --no-use-sqlite-wal

  Disable the use-sqlite-wal setting.

• --no-warn-dirty

  Disable the warn-dirty setting.

• --plugin-files value

  Set the plugin-files setting.

• --post-build-hook value

  Set the post-build-hook setting.

• --pre-build-hook value

  Set the pre-build-hook setting.

• --preallocate-contents

  Enable the preallocate-contents setting.

• --print-missing

  Enable the print-missing setting.

• --pure-eval

  Enable the pure-eval setting.

• --relaxed-sandbox

  Enable sandboxing, but allow builds to disable it.

• --require-sigs

  Enable the require-sigs setting.

• --restrict-eval

  Enable the restrict-eval setting.

• --run-diff-hook

  Enable the run-diff-hook setting.

• --sandbox

  Enable sandboxing.

• --sandbox-build-dir value

  Set the sandbox-build-dir setting.

• --sandbox-dev-shm-size value

  Set the sandbox-dev-shm-size setting.

• --sandbox-fallback

  Enable the sandbox-fallback setting.

• --sandbox-paths value

  Set the sandbox-paths setting.

• --secret-key-files value

  Set the secret-key-files setting.

• --show-trace

  Enable the show-trace setting.

• --stalled-download-timeout value

  Set the stalled-download-timeout setting.

• --start-id value

  Set the start-id setting.

• --store value

  Set the store setting.

• --substitute

  Enable the substitute setting.

• --substituters value

  Set the substituters setting.

• --sync-before-registering

  Enable the sync-before-registering setting.

• --system value

  Set the system setting.

• --system-features value

  Set the system-features setting.

• --tarball-ttl value

  Set the tarball-ttl setting.

• --timeout value

  Set the timeout setting.

• --trace-function-calls

  Enable the trace-function-calls setting.

• --trace-verbose

  Enable the trace-verbose setting.

• --trusted-public-keys value

  Set the trusted-public-keys setting.

• --trusted-substituters value

  Set the trusted-substituters setting.

• --trusted-users value

  Set the trusted-users setting.

• --use-case-hack

  Enable the use-case-hack setting.

• --use-cgroups

  Enable the use-cgroups setting.

• --use-registries

  Enable the use-registries setting.

• --use-sqlite-wal

  Enable the use-sqlite-wal setting.

• --user-agent-suffix value

  Set the user-agent-suffix setting.

• --warn-dirty

  Enable the warn-dirty setting.