Appendix B. Release Notes

Table of Contents

Release 23.11 (“Tapir”, 2023.11/29)
Release 23.05 (“Stoat”, 2023.05/31)
Release 22.11 (“Raccoon”, 2022.11/30)
Release 22.05 (“Quokka”, 2022.05/30)
Release 21.11 (“Porcupine”, 2021/11/30)
Release 21.05 (“Okapi”, 2021.05/31)
Release 20.09 (“Nightingale”, 2020.10/27)
Release 20.03 (“Markhor”, 2020.04/20)
Release 19.09 (“Loris”, 2019/10/09)
Release 19.03 (“Koi”, 2019/04/11)
Release 18.09 (“Jellyfish”, 2018/10/05)
Release 18.03 (“Impala”, 2018/04/04)
Release 17.09 (“Hummingbird”, 2017/09/??)
Release 17.03 (“Gorilla”, 2017/03/31)
Release 16.09 (“Flounder”, 2016/09/30)
Release 16.03 (“Emu”, 2016/03/31)
Release 15.09 (“Dingo”, 2015/09/30)
Release 14.12 (“Caterpillar”, 2014/12/30)
Release 14.04 (“Baboon”, 2014/04/30)
Release 13.10 (“Aardvark”, 2013/10/31)

This section lists the release notes for each stable version of NixOS and current unstable revision.

Release 23.11 (“Tapir”, 2023.11/29)

The NixOS release team is happy to announce a new version of NixOS. The release is called NixOS 23.11 (“Tapir”).

NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS.

Support is planned until the end of June 2024, handing over to NixOS 24.05.

To upgrade to the latest release, follow the upgrade chapter and check the Breaking Changes section for packages and services used in your configuration.

The team is excited about the many software updates and improvements in this release. Just to name a few, do check the updates for GNOME packages, systemd, glibc, the ROCM package set, and hostapd (which brings support for WiFi6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and WPA3-SAE-PK).

Make sure to also check the many updates in the Nixpkgs library when developing your own packages.

NixOS

Breaking Changes

  • services.postgresql.ensurePermissions has been deprecated in favor of services.postgresql.ensureUsers.*.ensureDBOwnership which simplifies the setup of database owned by a certain system user in local database contexts (which make use of peer authentication via UNIX sockets), migration guidelines were provided in the NixOS manual, please refer to them if you are affected by a PostgreSQL 15 changing the way GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES is working. services.postgresql.ensurePermissions will be removed in 24.05. All NixOS modules were migrated using one of the strategy, e.g. ensureDBOwnership or postStart. Refer to the PR #266270 for more details.

  • network-online.target has been fixed to no longer time out for systems with networking.useDHCP = true and networking.useNetworkd = true. Workarounds for this can be removed.

  • The boot.loader.raspberryPi options have been marked deprecated, with intent of removal for NixOS 24.11. They had a limited use-case, and do not work like people expect. They required either very old installs from (before mid-2019) or customized builds out of scope of the standard and generic AArch64 support. That option set never supported the Raspberry Pi 4 family of devices.

  • python3.pkgs.sequoia was removed in favor of python3.pkgs.pysequoia. The latter package is based on upstream’s dedicated repository for sequoia’s Python bindings, where the Python bindings from gitlab:sequoia-pgp/sequoia were removed long ago.

  • writeTextFile requires executable to be boolean now, values like null or "" will fail to evaluate now.

  • The latest version of clonehero now stores custom content in ~/.clonehero. Refer to the migration instructions for more details. Typically, these content files would exist along side the binary, but the previous build used a wrapper script that would store them in ~/.config/unity3d/srylain Inc_/Clone Hero.

  • services.mastodon doesn’t support providing a TCP port to its streaming component anymore, as upstream implemented parallelization by running multiple instances instead of running multiple processes in one instance. Please create a PR if you are interested in this feature.
    Due to this, the desired number of such instances services.mastodon.streamingProcesses now needs to be declared explicitly.

  • The services.hostapd module was rewritten to support passwordFile like options, WPA3-SAE, and management of multiple interfaces. This breaks compatibility with older configurations.

  • python3.pkgs.fetchPypi and python3Packages.fetchPypi have been deprecated in favor of top-level fetchPypi.

  • xdg-desktop-portal has been updated to 1.18, which reworked how portal implementations are selected. If you roll your own desktop environment, you should either set xdg.portal.config or xdg.portal.configPackages, which allow fine-grained control over which portal backend to use for specific interfaces, as described in portals.conf(5).

    If you don’t provide configurations, a portal backend will only be considered when the desktop you use matches its deprecated UseIn key. While some NixOS desktop modules should already ship one for you, it is suggested to test portal availability by trying Door Knocker and ASHPD Demo. If things regressed, you may run G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all /path/to/xdg-desktop-portal/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal for ideas on which config file and which portals are chosen.

  • pass now does not contain password-store.el. Users should get password-store.el from Emacs lisp package set emacs.pkgs.password-store.

  • services.knot now supports .settings from RFC42. The previous .extraConfig still works the same, but it displays a warning now.

  • mu does not install mu4e files by default now. Users should get mu4e from Emacs lisp package set emacs.pkgs.mu4e.

  • mariadb now defaults to mariadb_1011 instead of mariadb_106, meaning the default version was upgraded from v10.6.x to v10.11.x. Refer to the upgrade notes for potential issues.

  • getent has been moved from glibc’s bin output to its own dedicated output, reducing closure size for many dependents. Dependents using the getent alias should not be affected; others should move from using glibc.bin or getBin glibc to getent (which also improves compatibility with non-glibc platforms).

  • maintainers/scripts/update-luarocks-packages is now a proper package luarocks-packages-updater that can be run to maintain out-of-tree luarocks packages.

  • The users.users.<name>.passwordFile has been renamed to users.users.<name>.hashedPasswordFile to avoid possible confusions. The option is in fact the file-based version of hashedPassword, not password, and expects a file containing the crypt(3) hash of the user password.

  • chromiumBeta and chromiumDev have been removed due to the lack of maintenance in nixpkgs. Consider using chromium instead.

  • google-chrome-beta and google-chrome-dev have been removed due to the lack of maintenance in nixpkgs. Consider using google-chrome instead.

  • The services.ananicy.extraRules option now has the type of listOf attrs instead of string.

  • buildVimPluginFrom2Nix has been renamed to buildVimPlugin, which now now skips configurePhase and buildPhase.

  • JACK tools (jack_* except jack_control) have moved from the jack2 package to jack-example-tools.

  • The waagent service does provisioning now.

  • The matrix-synapse package & module have undergone some significant internal changes, for most setups no intervention is needed, though:

    • The option services.matrix-synapse.package is read-only now. For modifying the package, use an overlay which modifies matrix-synapse-unwrapped instead. More on that below.

    • The enableSystemd & enableRedis arguments have been removed and matrix-synapse has been renamed to matrix-synapse-unwrapped. Also, several optional dependencies (such as psycopg2 or authlib) have been removed.

    • These optional dependencies are automatically added via a wrapper (pkgs.matrix-synapse.override { extras = ["redis"]; } for hiredis & txredisapi for instance) if the relevant config section is declared in services.matrix-synapse.settings. For instance, if services.matrix-synapse.settings.redis.enabled is set to true, "redis" will be automatically added to the extras list of pkgs.matrix-synapse.

    • A list of all extras (and the extras enabled by default) can be found at the option’s reference for services.matrix-synapse.extras.

    • In some cases (e.g. for running synapse workers) it was necessary to re-use the PYTHONPATH of matrix-synapse.service’s environment to have all plugins available. This isn’t necessary anymore, instead config.services.matrix-synapse.package can be used as it points to the wrapper with properly configured extras and also all plugins defined via services.matrix-synapse.plugins available. This is also the reason for why the option is read-only now, it’s supposed to be set by the module only.

  • netbox was updated to v3.6. services.netbox.package still defaults to v3.5 if stateVersion is earlier than 23.11. Refer to upstream’s breaking changes for v3.6.0 and upgrade NetBox by changing services.netbox.package. Database migrations will be run automatically.

  • etcd has been updated to v3.5. Refer to upgrade guides for v3.3 to v3.4 and v3.4 to v3.5 for more details.

  • gitlab installations created or updated between versions [15.11.0, 15.11.2] have an incorrect database schema. This will become a problem when upgrading to gitlab >=16.2.0. A workaround for affected users can be found in the GitLab docs.

  • consul has been updated to v1.16.0. Refer to the release note for more details. Once a new Consul version has started and upgraded it’s data directory, it generally cannot be downgraded to the previous version.

  • llvmPackages_rocm has been moved to rocmPackages.llvm.

  • hip, rocm-opencl-runtime, rocm-opencl-icd, and rocclr have been combined into rocmPackages.clr.

  • clang-ocl, clr, composable_kernel, hipblas, hipcc, hip-common, hipcub, hipfft, hipfort, hipify, hipsolver, hipsparse, migraphx, miopen, miopengemm, rccl, rdc, rocalution, rocblas, rocdgbapi, rocfft, rocgdb, rocm-cmake, rocm-comgr, rocm-core, rocm-device-libs, rocminfo, rocmlir, rocm-runtime, rocm-smi, rocm-thunk, rocprim, rocprofiler, rocrand, rocr-debug-agent, rocsolver, rocsparse, rocthrust, roctracer, rocwmma, and tensile have been moved to rocmPackages.

  • himalaya has been updated to v0.8.0, which drops the native TLS support (in favor of Rustls) and add OAuth 2.0 support. Refer to the release note for more details.

  • nix-prefetch-git now ignores global and user git config, to improve reproducibility.

  • The services.caddy.acmeCA option defaults to null instead of "https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory" now. To use all of Caddy’s default ACME CAs and enable Caddy’s automatic issuer fallback feature by default, as recommended by upstream.

  • The default priorities of services.nextcloud.phpOptions have changed. This means that e.g. services.nextcloud.phpOptions."opcache.interned_strings_buffer" = "23"; doesn’t discard all of the other defaults from this option anymore. The attribute values of phpOptions are still defaults, these can be overridden as shown here.

    To override all of the options (including including upload_max_filesize, post_max_size and memory_limit which all point to services.nextcloud.maxUploadSize by default) can be done like this:

    {
      services.nextcloud.phpOptions = lib.mkForce {
        /* ... */
      };
    }
    
  • php80 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version anymore.

  • PHP defaults to PHP 8.2 now, updated from v8.1.

  • GraalVM has been updated to the latest version, and this brings significant changes. Upstream don’t release multiple versions targeting different JVMs anymore, so now we only have one GraalVM derivation (graalvm-ce). While at first glance the version may seem a downgrade (v22.3.1 -> v21.0.0), the major version is now following the JVM it targets (so this latest version targets JVM 21). Also some products like llvm-installable-svm and native-image-svm were incorporate to the main GraalVM derivation, so they’re included by default.

  • GraalPy (graalCEPackages.graalpy), TruffleRuby (graalCEPackages.truffleruby), GraalJS (graalCEPackages.graaljs) and GraalNodeJS (grallCEPackages.graalnodejs) are now independent from the main GraalVM derivation.

  • The ISC DHCP package and corresponding module have been removed, because they are EOL upstream. Refer to this post for details and switch to a different DHCP implementation like kea or dnsmasq.

  • prometheus-unbound-exporter has been replaced by the Let’s Encrypt maintained version, since the previous version was archived. This requires some changes to the module configuration, most notable controlInterface needs migration towards unbound.host and requires either the tcp:// or unix:// URI scheme.

  • odoo defaults to v16 now, updated from v15.

  • varnish was upgraded from v7.2.x to v7.4.x. Refer to upgrade guides vor v7.3 and v7.4. The current LTS version is still offered as varnish60.

  • util-linux is now supported on Darwin and is no longer an alias to unixtools. Use the unixtools.util-linux package for access to the Apple variants of the utilities.

  • services.keyd changed API. Now you can create multiple configuration files.

  • baloo, the file indexer and search engine used by KDE now has a patch to prevent files from constantly being reindexed when the device IDs of the their underlying storage change. This happens frequently when using btrfs or LVM. The patch has not yet been accepted upstream but it provides a significantly improved experience. When upgrading, reset baloo to get a clean index: balooctl disable ; balooctl purge ; balooctl enable.

  • The vlock program from the kbd package has been moved into its own package output and should now be referenced explicitly as kbd.vlock or replaced with an alternative such as the standalone vlock package or physlock.

  • fileSystems.<name>.autoFormat now uses systemd-makefs, which does not accept formatting options. Therefore, fileSystems.<name>.formatOptions has been removed.

  • fileSystems.<name>.autoResize uses systemd-growfs to resize the file system online in Stage 2 now. This means that f2fs and ext2 can no longer be auto resized, while xfs and btrfs now can be.

  • fuse3 has been updated from v3.11.0 to v3.16.2. Refer to the changelog for an overview of the changes.

    Unsupported mount options are no longer silently accepted (since 3.15.0). The affected mount options are: atime, diratime, lazytime, nolazytime, relatime, norelatime, strictatime.

    For example,

    $ sshfs 127.0.0.1:/home/test/testdir /home/test/sshfs_mnt -o atime
    

    would previously terminate successfully with the mount point established, now it outputs the error message fuse: unknown option(s): `-o atime' and terminates with exit status 1.

  • nixos-rebuild {switch,boot,test,dry-activate} runs the system activation inside systemd-run now, creating an ephemeral systemd service and protecting the system switch against issues like network disconnections during remote (e.g. SSH) sessions. This has the side effect of running the switch in an isolated environment, that could possible break post-switch scripts that depends on things like environment variables being set. If you want to opt-out from this behavior for now, you may set the NIXOS_SWITCH_USE_DIRTY_ENV environment variable before running nixos-rebuild. However, keep in mind that this option will be removed in the future.

  • The services.vaultwarden.config option default value was changed to make Vaultwarden only listen on localhost, following the secure defaults for most NixOS services.

  • services.lemmy.settings.federation was removed in v0.17.0 and no longer has any effect. To enable federation, the hostname must be set in the configuration file and then federation must be enabled in the admin web UI. Refer to the release notes for more details.

  • pict-rs was upgraded from v0.3 to v0.4 and contains an incompatible database & configuration change. To upgrade on systems with stateVersion = "23.05"; or older follow the migration steps from https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs#user-content-0-3-to-0-4-migration-guide and set services.pict-rs.package = pkgs.pict-rs;.

  • The following packages in haskellPackages have a separate bin output now: cabal-fmt, calligraphy, eventlog2html, ghc-debug-brick, hindent, nixfmt, releaser. This means you need to replace e.g. "${pkgs.haskellPackages.nixfmt}/bin/nixfmt" with "${lib.getBin pkgs.haskellPackages.nixfmt}/bin/nixfmt" or "${lib.getExe pkgs.haskellPackages.nixfmt}". The binaries also won’t be in scope if you rely on them being installed e.g. via ghcWithPackages. environment.packages picks the bin output automatically, so for normal installation no intervention is required. Also, toplevel attributes like pkgs.nixfmt are not impacted negatively by this change.

  • spamassassin no longer supports the Hashcash module. The module needs to be removed from the loadplugin list if it was copied over from the default initPreConf option.

  • nano was removed from environment.defaultPackages. To not leave systems without a editor, now programs.nano.enable is enabled by default.

  • programs.nano.nanorc and programs.nano.syntaxHighlight no longer have an effect unless programs.nano.enable is set to true which is the default.

  • services.outline.sequelizeArguments has been removed, as outline no longer executes database migrations via the sequelize cli.

  • The binary of the package cloud-sql-proxy has changed from cloud_sql_proxy to cloud-sql-proxy.

  • The module services.apache-kafka was largely rewritten and has certain breaking changes. To be precise, this means that the following things have changed:

  • Garage has been upgraded to v0.9.x. services.garage.package needs to be explicitly set now, so version upgrades can be done in a controlled fashion. For this, we expose garage_x_y attributes which can be set here.

  • voms and xrootd now moves the $out/etc content to the $etc output instead of $out/etc.orig, when input argument externalEtc is not null.

  • The woodpecker-* CI packages have been updated to v1.0.0. This release is wildly incompatible with the v0.15.x versions that were previously packaged. Refer to upstream’s documentation to learn how to update your CI configurations.

  • Meilisearch was updated from v1.3.1 to v1.5.0. The update has breaking changes about backslashes and filtering. Refer to the release announcement for more details.

  • The Caddy module gained a new option named services.caddy.enableReload which is enabled by default. It allows reloading the service instead of restarting it, if only a config file has changed. This option must be disabled if you have turned off the Caddy admin API. If you keep this option enabled, you should consider setting grace_period to a non-infinite value to prevent Caddy from delaying the reload indefinitely.

  • mdraid support is optional now. This reduces initramfs size and prevents the potentially undesired automatic detection and activation of software RAID pools. It is disabled by default in new configurations (determined by stateVersion), but the appropriate settings will be generated by nixos-generate-config when installing to a software RAID device, so the standard installation procedure should be unaffected. If you have custom configs relying on mdraid, ensure that you use stateVersion correctly or set boot.swraid.enable manually. On systems with an updated stateVersion we now also emit warnings if mdadm.conf does not contain the minimum required configuration necessary to run the dynamically enabled monitoring daemons.

  • The go-ethereum package has been updated to v1.12.0. This drops support for proof-of-work. Its GraphQL API now encodes all numeric values as hex strings and the GraphQL UI is updated to v2.0. The default database has changed from leveldb to pebble but leveldb can be forced with the –db.engine=leveldb flag. The checkpoint-admin command was removed along with trusted checkpoints.

  • The aseprite-unfree package has been upgraded from v1.2.16.3 to v1.2.40. The free version of aseprite has been dropped because it is EOL and the package attribute now points to the unfree version. A maintained fork of the last free version of Aseprite, named ‘LibreSprite’, is available in the libresprite package.

  • The default kops version is v1.28.0 now and support for v1.25 and older have been dropped.

  • pharo has been updated to latest stable v10.0.8, which is compatible with the latest stable and oldstable images (Pharo 10 and 11). The VM in question is the 64bit Spur. The 32bit version has been dropped due to lack of maintenance. The Cog VM has been deleted because it is severily outdated. Finally, the pharo-launcher package has been deleted because it was not compatible with the newer VM, and due to lack of maintenance.

  • Emacs mainline v29 was introduced. This new version includes many major additions, most notably tree-sitter support (enabled by default) and the pgtk variant (useful for Wayland users), which is available under the attribute emacs29-pgtk.

  • Emacs macport version 29 was introduced.

  • The option services.networking.networkmanager.enableFccUnlock was removed in favor of networking.networkmanager.fccUnlockScripts, which allows specifying unlock scripts explicitly. The previous option enabled all unlock scripts bundled with ModemManager, which is risky, and didn’t allow using vendor-provided unlock scripts at all.

  • The html-proofer package has been updated from major version 3 to major version 5, which includes breaking changes.

  • kratos has been updated from v0.10.1 to the first stable v1.0.0, please read the v0.10.1 to v0.11.0, v0.11.0 to v0.11.1, v0.11.1 to v0.13.0 and v0.13.0 to v1.0.0 upgrade guides. The most notable breaking change is the introduction of one-time passwords (code) and update of the default recovery strategy from link to code.

  • The hail module was removed, as hail was unmaintained since 2017.

  • Package noto-fonts-emoji was renamed to noto-fonts-color-emoji. Refer to PR #221181 for more details.

  • Package cloud-sql-proxy was renamed to google-cloud-sql-proxy as it cannot be used with other cloud providers.

  • Package pash was removed due to being archived upstream. Use powershell as an alternative.

  • The option services.plausible.releaseCookiePath has been removed. Plausible does not use any distributed Erlang features, and does not plan to (refer to discussion), Thus NixOS disables them now , and the Erlang cookie becomes unnecessary. You may delete the file that releaseCookiePath was set to.

  • security.sudo.extraRules includes root’s default rule now, with ordering priority 400. This is functionally identical for users not specifying rule order, or relying on mkBefore and mkAfter, but may impact users calling mkOrder n with n ≤ 400.

  • X keyboard extension (XKB) options have been reorganized into a single attribute set, services.xserver.xkb. Specifically, services.xserver.layout is services.xserver.xkb.layout now, services.xserver.extraLayouts is services.xserver.xkb.extraLayouts now, services.xserver.xkbModel is services.xserver.xkb.model now, services.xserver.xkbOptions is services.xserver.xkb.options now , services.xserver.xkbVariant is services.xserver.xkb.variant now, and services.xserver.xkbDir is services.xserver.xkb.dir now.

  • networking.networkmanager.firewallBackend was removed as NixOS is now using iptables-nftables-compat even when using iptables, therefore Networkmanager uses the nftables backend unconditionally now.

  • rome was removed because it is no longer maintained and is succeeded by biome.

  • The prometheus-knot-exporter was migrated to a version maintained by CZ.NIC. Various metric names have changed, so checking existing rules is recommended.

  • The services.mtr-exporter.target has been removed in favor of services.mtr-exporter.jobs which allows specifying multiple targets.

  • blender-with-packages has been deprecated in favor of blender.withPackages, for example blender.withPackages (ps: [ps.bpycv]). It behaves similarly to python3.withPackages.

  • Setting nixpkgs.config options while providing an external pkgs instance will now raise an error instead of silently ignoring the options. NixOS modules no longer set nixpkgs.config to accommodate this. This specifically affects services.locate, services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.tiny and programs.firefox NixOS modules. No manual intervention should be required in most cases, however, configurations relying on those modules affecting packages outside the system environment should switch to explicit overlays.

  • privacyidea (and the corresponding privacyidea-ldap-proxy) has been removed from nixpkgs because it has severely outdated dependencies that became unmaintainable with nixpkgs’ python package-set.

  • dagger was removed because using a package called dagger and packaging it from source violates their trademark policy.

  • win-virtio package was renamed to virtio-win to be consistent with the upstream package name.

  • ps3netsrv has been replaced with the webman-mod fork, the executable has been renamed from ps3netsrv++ to ps3netsrv and cli parameters have changed.

  • ssm-agent package and module were renamed to amazon-ssm-agent to be consistent with the upstream package name.

  • services.kea.{ctrl-agent,dhcp-ddns,dhcp,dhcp6} now use separate runtime directories instead of /run/kea to work around the runtime directory being cleared on service start.

  • mkDerivation rejects MD5 hashes now.

  • The junicode font package has been updated to major v2, which is a font family now. In particular, plain Junicode.ttf no longer exists. In addition, TrueType font files are now placed in font/truetype instead of font/junicode-ttf; this change does not affect use via fonts.packages option.

  • The prayer package as well as services.prayer have been removed because it’s been unmaintained for several years and the author’s website has vanished.

  • The chrony NixOS module now tracks the real-time clock drift from the system clock with rtcfile and automatically adjusts it with rtcautotrim when it exceeds the maximum error specified in services.chrony.autotrimThreshold (defaults to 30 seconds). If you enabled rtcsync in extraConfig, you should remove RTC related options from extraConfig. If you do not want chrony configured to keep the RTC in check, you can set services.chrony.enableRTCTrimming = false;.

  • Cassandra now defaults to v4.x, updated from v3.11.x.

  • FoundationDB now defaults to major version 7.

  • glibc has been updated from v2.37 to v2.38. Refer to the the release notes for more details.

  • linuxPackages_testing_bcachefs is now soft-deprecated by linuxPackages_testing.

    • Please consider changing your NixOS configuration’s boot.kernelPackages to linuxPackages_testing until a stable kernel with bcachefs support is released.

  • PostgreSQL now defaults to major version 15.

  • All ROCm packages have been updated to v5.7.0.

    • ROCm package attribute sets are versioned: rocmPackages -> rocmPackages_5.

  • systemd has been updated from v253 to v254, refer to the release notes for more details.

    • boot.resumeDevice must be specified when hibernating if not in EFI mode.

    • systemd may warn your system about the permissions of your ESP partition (often /boot), this warning can be ignored for now, we are looking into a satisfying solution regarding this problem.

    • Updating with nixos-rebuild boot and rebooting is recommended, since in some rare cases the nixos-rebuild switch into the new generation on a live system might fail due to missing mount units.

  • If the user has a custom shell enabled via users.users.${USERNAME}.shell = ${CUSTOMSHELL}, the assertion will require them to also set programs.${CUSTOMSHELL}.enable = true. This is generally safe behavior, but for anyone needing to opt out from the check users.users.${USERNAME}.ignoreShellProgramCheck = true will do the job.

  • yarn-berry has been updated to v4.0.1. This means that NodeJS versions less v18.12 are no longer supported by it. Refer to the upstream changelog for more details.

  • GNOME has been updated to v45. Refer to the release notes for more details. Notably, Loupe has replaced Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, Snapshot has replaced Cheese as the default camera application, and Photos will no longer be installed.

  • The module services.ankisyncd has been switched to anki-sync-server-rs. The former version written in Python was difficult to update, did not receive updates in a while, and did not support recent versions of Anki.

    Unfortunately all servers supporting new clients do not support the older sync protocol that was used in the old server. This includes newer version of anki-sync-server, Anki’s built in sync server and this new Rust package. Thus old clients will also need updating. In particular nixpkgs’s Anki package is also being updated in this release.

    The module update takes care of the new config syntax. The data itself (i.e. user login and card information) is compatible. Thus users of the module will be able to simply log in again after updating both client and server without any extra action needed to be taken.

  • The argument vendorSha256 of buildGoModule is deprecated. Use vendorHash instead. Refer to PR #259999) for more details.

  • go-modules in buildGoModule attrs has been renamed to goModules.

  • The package cawbird is dropped from nixpkgs. It broke by the Twitter API closing down and has been abandoned upstream.

  • The Cinnamon module now enables XDG desktop integration by default. If you are experiencing collisions related to xdg-desktop-portal-gtk you can safely remove xdg.portal.extraPortals = [ pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gtk ]; from your NixOS configuration.

  • GNOME, Pantheon, Cinnamon modules no longer force Qt applications to use Adwaita style. This implemantion was buggy and is no longer maintained upstream. Specifically, Cinnamon defaults to the gtk2 style instead now, following the default in Linux Mint). If you still want Adwaita used, you may add the following options to your configuration. Please be aware, that it will probably be removed eventually.

    qt = {
      enable = true;
      platformTheme = "gnome";
      style = "adwaita";
    };
    
  • DocBook option documentation is no longer supported, all module documentation now uses Markdown.

  • Docker defaults to v24 now, as 20.10 is stopping to receive security updates and bug fixes after December 10, 2023.

  • Elixir defaults to v1.15 now. Refer to their changelog for more details.

  • The extend function of llvmPackages has been removed due it coming from the tools attrset thus only extending the tool attrset. A possible replacement is to construct the set from libraries and tools, or patch nixpkgs.

  • ffmpeg defaults to ffmpeg_6 now, upgrading from ffmpeg_5.

  • fontconfig defaults to using greyscale antialiasing now. Previously subpixel antialiasing was used because of a recommendation from one of the downstreams. You can change this value by configuring fonts.fontconfig.subpixel.rgba accordingly.

  • The fonts.fonts and fonts.enableDefaultFonts options have been renamed to fonts.packages and fonts.enableDefaultPackages respectively.

  • services.hedgedoc has been heavily refactored, reducing the amount of declared options in the module. Most of the options should still work without any changes to the configuration. Some options have been deprecated, as they no longer have any effect. Refer to PR #244941 for more details.

  • jq was updated to v1.7. This is its first release in 5 years.

  • lib.attrsets.foldlAttrs now always evaluates the initial accumulator argument first.

  • lib.lists.foldl' now always evaluates the initial accumulator argument first. If you depend on the lazier behavior, consider using lib.lists.foldl or builtins.foldl' instead.

  • Now magma defaults to magma-hip instead of magma-cuda. It also respects the config.cudaSupport and config.rocmSupport options.

  • The MariaDB C client library was upgraded from v3.2.x to v3.3.x. Refer to the upstream release notes for more details.

  • Mattermost has been upgraded to extended support version 8.1 as the previously packaged extended support version 7.8 is reaching end-of-life. Migration may take some time, refer to the changelog and important upgrade notes.

  • The netdata package disables cloud support by default now. To enable it use the netdataCloud package.

  • networking.nftables is no longer flushing all rulesets on every reload. Use networking.nftables.flushRuleset = true; to enable the previous behaviour.

  • Node.js v14, v16 has been removed as they were end of life. Any dependent packages that contributors were not able to reasonably upgrade were dropped after a month of notice to their maintainers, were removed.

    • This includes VSCode Server.

    • This includes Kibana 7 as the ELK stack is unmaintained in nixpkgs and is marked for slow removal.

  • The application firewall opensnitch uses the process monitor method eBPF as default now. This is recommended by upstream. The method may be changed with the setting services.opensnitch.settings.ProcMonitorMethod.

  • paperwork is updated to v2.2. Documents scanned with this version will not be visible to previous versions if you downgrade. Refer to the upstream announcement for details and workarounds.

  • The latest available version of Nextcloud is v27 (available as pkgs.nextcloud27). The installation logic is as follows:

  • postgresql_11 has been removed since it’ll stop receiving fixes on November 9th 2023.

  • programs.gnupg.agent.pinentryFlavor is set in /etc/gnupg/gpg-agent.conf now. It will no longer take precedence over a pinentry-program set in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf.

  • python3.pkgs.flitBuildHook has been removed. Use flit-core and format = "pyproject" instead.

  • Certificate generation via the security.acme limits the concurrent number of running certificate renewals and generation jobs now. This is to avoid spiking resource usage when processing many certificates at once. The limit defaults to 5 and can be adjusted via maxConcurrentRenewals. Setting the value to 0 disables the limits altogether.

  • services.borgmatic.settings.location and services.borgmatic.configurations.<name>.location are deprecated, please move your options out of sections to the global scope.

  • services.fail2ban.jails can be configured with attribute sets now, defining settings and filters instead of lines. The stringed options daemonConfig and extraSettings have respectively been replaced by daemonSettings and jails.DEFAULT.settings. Those use attribute sets.

  • The services.mbpfan module has the option aggressive enabled by default now. This is for better heat moderation. To get the upstream defaults you may disable this.

  • Apptainer/Singularity defaults to using "$out/var/lib" for the LOCALSTATEDIR configuration option instead of the top-level "/var/lib" now. This change impacts the SESSIONDIR (container-run-time mount point) configuration, which is set to $LOCALSTATEDIR/<apptainer or singularity>/mnt/session. This detaches the packages from the top-level directory, rendering the NixOS module optional.

    The default behavior of the NixOS module programs.singularity stays unchanged. We add a new option programs.singularity.enableExternalSysConfDir (default to true) to specify whether to set the top-level "/var/lib" as LOCALSTATEDIR or not.

  • The services.sslh module has been updated to follow RFC 0042. As such, several options have been moved to the freeform attribute set services.sslh.settings, which allows to change any of the settings in sslh(8).

    In addition, the newly added option services.sslh.method allows to switch between the fork(2), select(2) and libev-based connection handling method. Refer to the sslh docs for a comparison.

  • Suricata was upgraded from v6.0 to v7.0 and no longer considers HTTP/2 support as experimental. Refer to upstream release notes for more details.

  • teleport has been upgraded from major version 12 to major version 14. Refer to upstream upgrade instructions and release notes for v13 and v14. Note that Teleport does not officially support upgrades across more than one major version at a time. If you’re running Teleport server components, it is recommended to first upgrade to an intermediate v13.x version by setting services.teleport.package = pkgs.teleport_13. Afterwards, this option can be removed to upgrade to the default version (14).

  • zfs was updated from v2.1.x to v2.2.0, enabling newer kernel support and adding new features.

  • The use of sourceRoot = "source";, sourceRoot = "source/subdir";, and similar lines in package derivations using the default unpackPhase is deprecated as it requires unpackPhase to always produce a directory named “source”. Use sourceRoot = src.name, sourceRoot = "${src.name}/subdir";, or setSourceRoot = "sourceRoot=$(echo */subdir)"; or similar instead.

  • The django alias in the python package set was upgraded to Django v4.x. Applications that consume Django should always pin their python environment to a compatible major version, so they can move at their own pace.

    python = python3.override {
      packageOverrides = self: super: {
        django = super.django_3;
      };
    };
    
  • The qemu-vm.nix module by default now identifies block devices via persistent names available in /dev/disk/by-*. Because the rootDevice is identified by its filesystem label, it needs to be formatted before the VM is started. The functionality of automatically formatting the rootDevice in the initrd is removed from the QEMU module. However, for tests that depend on this functionality, a test utility for the scripted initrd is added (nixos/tests/common/auto-format-root-device.nix). To use this in a NixOS test, import the module, e.g. imports = [ ./common/auto-format-root-device.nix ]; When you use the systemd initrd, you can automatically format the root device by setting virtualisation.fileSystems."/".autoFormat = true;.

  • The electron packages places its application files in $out/libexec/electron instead of $out/lib/electron now. Packages using electron-builder will fail to build and need to be adjusted by changing lib to libexec.

New Services

Other Notable Changes

  • The new option system.switch.enable was added. It is enabled by default. Disabling it makes the system unable to be reconfigured via nixos-rebuild. This is of advantage for image based appliances where updates are handled outside the image.

  • services.searx receives new options for better SearXNG support. This includes options for the built-in rate limiter, bot protection and automatically configuring a local Redis server.

  • The iptables firewall module installs the nixos-firewall-tool now which allows the user to easily temporarily open ports through the firewall.

  • A new option was added to the virtualisation module that enables specifying explicitly named network interfaces in QEMU VMs. The existing virtualisation.vlans is still supported for cases where the name of the network interface is irrelevant.

  • services.outline can be configured to use local filesystem storage now. Previously ony S3 storage was possible. This may be set using services.outline.storage.storageType.

  • pkgs.openvpn3 optionally supports systemd-resolved now. programs.openvpn3 will automatically enable systemd-resolved support if services.resolved.enable is set to true.

  • The services.woodpecker-server.environmentFile type was changed to list of paths to be more consistent to the woodpecker-agent module

  • services.matrix-synapse has new options to configure worker processes for matrix-synapse using services.matrix-synapse.workers. Configuring a local redis server using services.matrix-synapse.configureRedisLocally is also possible now.

  • The services.nginx module gained a defaultListen option at server-level with support for PROXY protocol listeners. Also proxyProtocol is exposed in the services.nginx.virtualHosts.<name>.listen option now. This it is possible to run PROXY listeners and non-PROXY listeners at a server-level. Refer to PR #213510 for more details.

  • services.restic.backups adds wrapper scripts to your system path now. This wrapper script sets the same environment variables as the service, so restic operations can easily be run from the command line. This behavior can be disabled by setting createWrapper to false, for each backup configuration.

  • services.prometheus.exporters has a new exporter to monitor electrical power consumption based on PowercapRAPL sensor called Scaphandre. Refer to PR #239803 for more details.

  • The services.calibre-server module has new options to configure the host, port, auth.enable, auth.mode and auth.userDb path. Refer to PR #216497 for more details.

  • services.prometheus.exporters has a new exporter to monitor PHP-FPM processes. Refer to PR #240394 for more details.

  • services.github-runner and services.github-runners.<name> gained the option nodeRuntimes. This option defaults to [ "node20" ]. I.e., the service supports Node.js 20 GitHub Actions only. The list of Node.js versions accepted by nodeRuntimes tracks the versions the upstream GitHub Actions runner supports. Refer to PR #249103 for details.

  • programs.gnupg has the option agent.settings now. This allows setting verbatim config values in /etc/gnupg/gpg-agent.conf.

  • dockerTools.buildImage, dockerTools.buildLayeredImage and dockerTools.streamLayeredImage use lib.makeOverridable now . This allows dockerTools-based images to be customized more efficiently at the Nix level.

  • services.influxdb2 supports doing an automatic initial setup and provisioning of users, organizations, buckets and authentication tokens now. Refer to PR #249502 for more details.

  • wrapHelm exposes passthru.pluginsDir now which can be passed to helmfile. For convenience, a top-level package helmfile-wrapped has been added, which inherits passthru.pluginsDir from kubernetes-helm-wrapped. Refer to PR #217768 for more details.

  • The boot.initrd.network.udhcp.enable option allows control over DHCP during Stage 1 regardless of what networking.useDHCP is set to.

  • networking.nftables has the option networking.nftables.table.<table> now. This creates tables and have them be updated atomically, instead of flushing the ruleset.

  • hardware.nvidia gained datacenter options for enabling NVIDIA Data Center drivers and configuration of NVLink/NVSwitch topologies through nv-fabricmanager.

  • The new boot.bcache.enable option allows completely removing bcache mount support. It is enabled by default.

  • security.sudo provides two extra options now, while not changing the module’s default behaviour:

    • defaultOptions controls the options used for the default rules;

    • keepTerminfo controls whether TERMINFO and TERMINFO_DIRS are preserved for root and the wheel group.

  • virtualisation.googleComputeImage provides a efi option to support UEFI booting now.

  • CoreDNS may be built with external plugins now. This may be done by overriding externalPlugins and vendorHash arguments like this:

    services.coredns = {
      enable = true;
      package = pkgs.coredns.override {
        externalPlugins = [
          {name = "fanout"; repo = "github.com/networkservicemesh/fanout"; version = "v1.9.1";}
        ];
        vendorHash = "<SRI hash>";
      };
    };
    

    To get the necessary SRI hash, set vendorHash = "";. The build will fail and produce the correct vendorHash in the error message.

    If you use this feature, updates to CoreDNS may require updating vendorHash by following these steps again.

  • Using fusuma enables the following plugins now: appmatcher, keypress, sendkey, tap and wmctrl.

  • The Home Assistant module offers support for installing custom components and lovelace modules now. Available at services.home-assistant.customComponents and services.home-assistant.customLovelaceModules.

  • TeX Live environments can now be built with the new texlive.withPackages. The procedure for creating custom TeX packages has been changed. Refer to the Nixpkgs manual for more details.

  • Support for WiFi6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and WPA3-SAE-PK was enabled in the hostapd package, along with a significant rework of the hostapd module.

  • LXD supports virtual machine instances now to complement the existing container support.

  • The nixos-rebuild command has been given a list-generations subcommand. Refer to man nixos-rebuild for more details.

  • sudo-rs, a reimplementation of sudo in Rust, is now supported. An experimental new module security.sudo-rs was added. Switching to it (via security.sudo-rs.enable = true;) introduces slight changes in sudo behaviour, due to sudo-rs’ current limitations:

    • terminfo-related environment variables aren’t preserved for root and wheel;

    • root and wheel are not given the ability to set (or preserve) arbitrary environment variables.

    Note: The sudo-rs module only takes configuration through security.sudo-rs, and in particular does not automatically use previously-set rules; this could be achieved with security.sudo-rs.extraRules = security.sudo.extraRules; for instance.

  • There is a new NixOS option when writing NixOS tests testing.initrdBackdoor, that enables backdoor.service in initrd. Requires boot.initrd.systemd.enable to be enabled. Boot will pause in Stage 1 at initrd.target, and will listen for commands from the Machine python interface, just like Stage 2 normally does. This enables commands to be sent to test and debug Stage 1. Use machine.switch_root() to leave Stage 1 and proceed to Stage 2.

  • The Linux kernel module msr (refer to msr(4)), which provides an interface to read and write the model-specific registers (MSRs) of an x86 CPU, can now be configured via hardware.cpu.x86.msr.

  • The qemu-vm.nix module now supports disabling overriding fileSystems with virtualisation.fileSystems. This enables the user to boot VMs from “external” disk images not created by the qemu-vm module. You can stop the qemu-vm module from overriding fileSystems by setting virtualisation.fileSystems = lib.mkForce { };.

  • wpa_supplicant’s configuration file cannot be read by non-root users, and secrets (such as Pre-Shared Keys) can safely be passed via networking.wireless.environmentFile.

    The configuration file could previously be read, when userControlled.enable (non-default), by users who are in both wheel and userControlled.group (defaults to wheel)

Nixpkgs Library

Breaking Changes

  • lib.lists.foldl' now always evaluates the initial accumulator argument first. If you depend on the lazier behavior, consider using lib.lists.foldl or builtins.foldl' instead.

  • lib.attrsets.foldlAttrs now always evaluates the initial accumulator argument first.

  • Now that the internal NixOS transition to Markdown documentation is complete, lib.options.literalDocBook has been removed after deprecation in 22.11.

  • lib.types.string is now fully deprecated and gives a warning when used.

Additions and Improvements

Module system:

  • Options in the options module argument now have the declarationPositions attribute containing the position where the option was declared:

    $ nix-repl -f '<nixpkgs/nixos>' [...]
    nix-repl> :p options.environment.systemPackages.declarationPositions
    [ {
      column = 7;
      file = "/nix/store/vm9zf9wvfd628cchj0hdij1g4hzjrcz9-source/nixos/modules/config/system-path.nix";
      line = 62;
    } ]
    

    Not to be confused with definitionsWithLocations, which is the same but for option definitions.

  • Improved error message for option declarations missing mkOption

Deprecations

  • lib.meta.getExe pkg (also available as lib.getExe) now gives a warning if pkg.meta.mainProgram is not set, but it continues to default to the derivation name. Nixpkgs accepts PRs that set meta.mainProgram on packages where it makes sense. Use lib.getExe' pkg "some-command" to avoid the warning and/or select a different executable.

Release 23.05 (“Stoat”, 2023.05/31)

The NixOS release team is happy to announce a new version of NixOS. The release is called NixOS 23.05 (“Stoat”).

NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS.

Support is planned until the end of December 2023, handing over to NixOS 23.11.

To upgrade to the latest release, follow the upgrade chapter.

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and updated packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • The default Nix version was updated from 2.11 to 2.13. In particular, this includes a small language alteration in the way floats are represented in builtins.toJSON. See the release notes for 2.12 and 2.13 for more information.

  • The default Linux Kernel was updated from version 5.15 to 6.1, see Kernelnewbies for what has changed. All Kernels currently shown on kernel.org are available.

  • systemd has been updated from v252 to v253, see the release notes for more information on the changes.

    • Updating with nixos-rebuild boot and rebooting is recommended, since in some rare cases the nixos-rebuild switch into the new generation on a live system might fail due to missing mount units.

  • glibc has been updated from version 2.35 to 2.37, see the release notes for what was changed.

  • libxcrypt, the library providing the crypt(3) password hashing function, is now built without support for algorithms not flagged strong. This affects the availability of password hashing algorithms used for system login (login(1), passwd(1)), but also Apache2 Basic-Auth, Samba, OpenLDAP, Dovecot, and many other packages.

  • NixOS now defaults to using nsncd, a non-caching reimplementation of nscd in Rust, as its NSS lookup dispatcher. This replaces the buggy and deprecated nscd implementation provided through glibc. When you find problems, you can switch back by disabling it:

    services.nscd.enableNsncd = false;
    
  • The internal option boot.bootspec.enable is now enabled by default because RFC 0125 was merged. This means you will have a bootspec document called boot.json generated for each system and specialisation in the top-level. This is useful to enable advanced boot use cases in NixOS, such as Secure Boot.

  • Two changes to nixos-rebuild are important to highlight as well.

    • Support for an extra --specialisation option was added that can be used to change specialisation for switch and test commands.

    • The --target-host and --build-host options no longer treat the localhost value specially – to build on resp. deploy to a local machine, omit the relevant flag.

  • Python implements PEP 668, providing better feedback to users that try to run pip install for system-wide or user home installations.

  • Cinnamon has been updated to version 5.6, see the pull request for what was changed.

  • GNOME has been updated to version 44, see the the release notes for details.

  • KDE Plasma has been updated to version 5.27, see the release notes for what was changed.

  • openra was updated to 20230225. Due to large scope of the update, currently only openraPackages.engines.release and openraPackages.engines.latest packages are available. If you want to use the old engine versions or mods, they were moved to the openraPackages_2019 namespace.

New Services

Backward Incompatibilities

  • services.asusd configuration now uses strings instead of structured configuration, as upstream switched to the RON configuration format. Support for structured configuration may return when RON generation is implemented in nixpkgs.

  • borgbackup module now has an option for inhibiting system sleep while backups are running, defaulting to off (not inhibiting sleep), available as services.borgbackup.jobs.<name>.inhibitsSleep.

  • The openssh client now comes with the ~C escape sequence disabled by default. It can be re-enabled by setting EnableEscapeCommandline yes

  • The programs.ssh client module does not read /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts2 anymore, since this location is deprecated since 2001.

  • The services.openssh server module does not read ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 anymore, since this location is deprecated since 2001.

  • MAC-then-encrypt algorithms were removed from the default selection of services.openssh.settings.Macs. If you still require these MACs, for example when you are relying on libssh2 (e.g. VLC) or the SSH library shipped on the iPhone, you can re-add them like this:

    services.openssh.settings.Macs = [
      "hmac-sha2-512"
      "hmac-sha2-256"
      "umac-128@openssh.com"
    ];
    
  • podman now uses the netavark network stack. Users will need to delete all of their local containers, images, volumes, etc, by running podman system reset --force once before upgrading their systems.

  • git-bug has been updated to at least version 0.8.0, which includes backwards incompatible changes. The git-bug-migration package can be used to upgrade existing repositories.

  • graylog has been updated to version 5, which can not be updated directly from the previously packaged version 3.3. If you had installed the previously packaged version 3.3, please follow the upgrade path from 3.3 to 4.0 to 4.3 to 5.0.

  • buildFHSUserEnv is now called buildFHSEnv and uses FlatPak’s Bubblewrap sandboxing tool rather than Nixpkgs’ own chrootenv. The old chrootenv-based implementation is still available via buildFHSEnvChroot but is considered deprecated and will be removed when the remaining uses inside Nixpkgs have been migrated. If your FHSEnv-wrapped application misbehaves when using the new bubblewrap implementation, please create an issue in Nixpkgs.

  • nushell has been updated to at least version 0.77.0, which includes potential breaking changes in aliases. The old aliases are now available as old-alias but it is recommended you migrate to the new format. See Reworked aliases.

  • gajim has been updated to version 1.7.3 which has disabled legacy ciphers. See changelog for version 1.7.0.

  • keepassx and keepassx2 have been removed, due to upstream stopping development. Consider KeePassXC as a maintained alternative.

  • The services.kubo.settings option is now no longer stateful. If you changed any of the options in services.kubo.settings in the past and then removed them from your NixOS configuration again, those changes are still in your Kubo configuration file but will now be reset to the default. If you’re unsure, you may want to make a backup of your configuration file (probably /var/lib/ipfs/config) and compare after the update.

  • The Kubo HTTP API will no longer listen on localhost and will instead only listen on a Unix domain socket by default. Read the services.kubo.settings.Addresses.API option description for more information.

  • The EC2 image module no longer fetches instance metadata in stage-1. This results in a significantly smaller initramfs, since network drivers no longer need to be included, and faster boots, since metadata fetching can happen in parallel with startup of other services. This breaks services which rely on metadata being present by the time stage-2 is entered. Anything which reads EC2 metadata from /etc/ec2-metadata should now have an after dependency on fetch-ec2-metadata.service

  • The mailman service now defaults to using a randomly generated REST API password instead of a hard-coded one.

  • minio removed support for its legacy filesystem backend in RELEASE.2022-10-29T06-21-33Z. This means if your storage was created with the old format, minio will no longer start. Unfortunately, minio doesn’t provide an automatic migration, they only provide instructions how to manually convert the node. To facilitate this migration, we keep around the last version that still supports the old filesystem backend as minio_legacy_fs. Use it via services.minio.package = minio_legacy_fs; to export your data before switching to the new version. See the corresponding issue for more details.

  • services.sourcehut.dispatch and the corresponding package (sourcehut.dispatchsrht) have been removed due to upstream deprecation.

  • The attributes used by services.snapper.configs.<name> have changed. Migrate from this:

    services.snapper.configs.example = {
      subvolume = "/example";
      extraConfig = ''
        ALLOW_USERS="alice"
      '';
    };
    

    to this:

    services.snapper.configs.example = {
      SUBVOLUME = "/example";
      ALLOW_USERS = [ "alice" ];
    };
    
  • The default module options for services.snapserver.openFirewall, services.tmate-ssh-server.openFirewall and services.unifi-video.openFirewall have been changed from true to false. You will need to explicitly set this option to true, or configure your firewall.

  • The option i18n.inputMethod.fcitx5.enableRimeData has been removed. Default RIME data is now included in fcitx5-rime by default, and can be customized using

    fcitx5-rime.override {
      rimeDataPkgs = [
        pkgs.rime-data
        # ...
      ];
    }
    
  • The udev hwdb.bin file is now built with systemd-hwdb rather than the deprecated “udevadm hwdb”. This may impact mappings where the same key is defined in multiple matching entries. The updated behavior will select the latest definition in case of conflict. In general, this should be a positive change, as the hwdb source files are designed with this ordering in mind. As an example, the mapping of the HP Dev One keyboard scan code for “mute mic” is corrected by this update. This change may impact users who have worked-around previously incorrect mappings.

  • Kime has been updated from 2.5.6 to 3.0.2 and the i18n.inputMethod.kime.config option has been removed. Users should use daemonModules, iconColor, and extraConfig options under i18n.inputMethod.kime instead.

  • tut has been updated from 1.0.34 to 2.0.0, and now uses the TOML format for the configuration file instead of INI. Additional information can be found here.

  • i3status-rust has been updated from 0.22.0 to 0.30.5, and this brings many changes to its configuration format. Additional information can be found here.

  • The wordpress derivation no longer contains any built-in plugins or themes. If you need them, you have to add them back to prevent your site from breaking. You can find them in wordpressPackages.{plugins,themes}.

  • llvmPackages_rocm.llvm will not contain clang or compiler-rt. llvmPackages_rocm.clang will not contain llvm. llvmPackages_rocm.clangNoCompilerRt has been removed in favor of using llvmPackages_rocm.clang-unwrapped.

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.excludePackages has been moved to environment.plasma5.excludePackages, for consistency with other Desktop Environments.

  • teleport has been updated from major version 10 to major version 12. Please see upstream upgrade instructions and release notes for versions 11 and 12. Note that Teleport does not officially support upgrades across more than one major version at a time. If you’re running Teleport server components, it is recommended to first upgrade to an intermediate 11.x version by setting services.teleport.package = pkgs.teleport_11. Afterwards, this option can be removed to upgrade to the default version (12).

  • The EC2 image module previously detected and automatically mounted ext3-formatted instance store devices and partitions in stage-1 (initramfs), storing /tmp on the first discovered device. This behaviour, which only catered to very specific use cases and could not be disabled, has been removed. Users relying on this should provide their own implementation, and probably use ext4 and perform the mount in stage-2.

  • The EC2 image module previously detected and activated swap-formatted instance store devices and partitions in stage-1 (initramfs). This behaviour has been removed. Users relying on this should provide their own implementation.

  • gitlab has been upgraded from major version 15 to major version 16 and requires at least PostgreSQL 13.6. Check the upgrade guide in the NixOS manual on how to upgrade your PostgreSQL installation.

  • gitlab 16 deprecates the use of external container registries, in our case pkgs.docker-distribution. Module users who have services.gitlab.registry.enable set to true are advised to back up their state and switch to gitlab’s fork by setting services.gitlab.registry.package to pkgs.gitlab-container-registry.

  • fail2ban has been updated to 1.0.2, which has a few breaking changes compared to 0.11.2 (changelog for 1.0.1, changelog for 1.0.2)

  • albert has been updated from 0.17.6 to 0.20.13, and 0.18.0 changed the config format and many plugins (changelog for 0.18.0)

  • dokuwiki has been updated from 2023-07-31a (Igor) to 2023-04-04 (Jack Jackrum), which has completely removed the options to embed HTML and PHP for security reasons. The htmlok plugin can be used to regain this functionality.

  • The old unsupported version 6.x of the ELK-stack and Elastic beats have been removed. Use OpenSearch instead.

  • The cosmoc package has been removed. The upstream scripts in cosmocc should be used instead.

  • Qt 5.12 and 5.14 have been removed, as the corresponding branches have been EOL upstream for a long time. This affected under 10 packages in nixpkgs, largely unmaintained upstream as well, however, out-of-tree package expressions may need to be updated manually.

  • The services.wordpress.sites.<name>.plugins and services.wordpress.sites.<name>.themes options have been converted from sets to attribute sets to allow for consumers to specify explicit install paths via attribute name.

  • protonmail-bridge package has been updated to major version 3.

  • Nebula now runs as a system user and group created for each nebula network, using the CAP_NET_ADMIN ambient capability on launch rather than starting as root. Ensure that any files each Nebula instance needs to access are owned by the correct user and group, by default nebula-${networkName}.

  • The i18n.inputMethod.fcitx option has been replaced with i18n.inputMethod.fcitx5 because fcitx 4 pkgs.fcitx has been removed.

  • In mastodon it is now necessary to specify location of file with PostgreSQL database password. In services.mastodon.database.passwordFile parameter default value /var/lib/mastodon/secrets/db-password has been changed to null.

  • The nix.readOnlyStore option has been renamed to boot.readOnlyNixStore to clarify that it configures the NixOS boot process, not the Nix daemon.

  • The latest available version of Nextcloud is v26 (available as pkgs.nextcloud26) which uses PHP 8.2 as interpreter by default. The installation logic is as follows:

    • If system.stateVersion is >=23.05, pkgs.nextcloud26 will be installed by default.

    • If system.stateVersion is >=22.11, pkgs.nextcloud25 will be installed by default.

    • Please note that an upgrade from v24 (or older) to v26 directly is not possible. Please upgrade to nextcloud25 (or earlier) first. Nextcloud prohibits skipping major versions while upgrading. You can upgrade by declaring services.nextcloud.package = pkgs.nextcloud25;.

    • It’s recommended to use the latest version available (i.e. v26) and to specify that using services.nextcloud.package.

  • .NET 5.0 and .NET 3.1 were removed due to being end-of-life, use a newer, supported .NET version. Visit the Support Policy for more information.

  • The iputils package, which is installed by default, no longer provides the ninfod, rarpd and rdisc tools. See upstream’s release notes for more details and available replacements.

  • The ppp plugin rp-pppoe.so has been renamed to pppoe.so in ppp 2.4.9. Starting from ppp 2.5.0, there is no longer an alias for backwards compatibility. Configurations that use this plugin must be updated accordingly from plugin rp-pppoe.so to plugin pppoe.so. See upstream change.

  • services.xserver.videoDrivers now defaults to the modesetting driver over device-specific ones. The radeon, amdgpu and nouveau drivers are still available, but effectively unmaintained and not recommended for use. Note that this does not affect your regular graphics drivers; this only concerns the DDX component of the driver, which most people are not relying on.

  • services.xserver.libinput.enable is now set by default, enabling the more actively maintained and consistently behaved input device driver.

  • To enable the HTTP3 (QUIC) protocol for a nginx virtual host, set the quic attribute on it to true, e.g. services.nginx.virtualHosts.<name>.quic = true;.

  • In services.fail2ban, bantime-increment.<name> options now default to null (except bantime-increment.enable) and are used to set the corresponding option in jail.local only if not null. Also, enforce that bantime-increment.formula and bantime-increment.multipliers are not both specified.

  • The default asterisk package was changed to v20 from v19. Asterisk versions 16 and 19 have been dropped due to being EOL. You may need to update /var/lib/asterisk to match the template files in ${asterisk-20}/var/lib/asterisk.

  • conntrack helper autodetection has been removed from kernels 6.0 and up upstream, and an assertion was added to ensure things don’t silently stop working. Migrate your configuration to assign helpers explicitly or use an older LTS kernel branch as a temporary workaround.

  • The services.pipewire.config options have been removed, as they have basically never worked correctly. All behavior defined by the default configuration can be overridden with drop-in files as necessary - see below for details.

  • The catch-all hardware.video.hidpi.enable option was removed. Users on high density displays may want to:

    • Set services.xserver.upscaleDefaultCursor to upscale the default X11 cursor for higher resolutions

    • Adjust settings under fonts.fontconfig according to preference

    • Adjust console.font according to preference, though the kernel will generally choose a reasonably sized font

  • services.pipewire.media-session and the pipewire-media-session package have been removed, as they are no longer supported upstream. Users are encouraged to use services.pipewire.wireplumber instead.

  • The baget package and module was removed due to being unmaintained.

  • The qlandkartegt and garmindev packages were removed due to being unmaintained and insecure.

  • The go-ethereum package has been updated to v1.11.5 and the puppeth command is no longer available as of v1.11.0.

  • The pnpm package has be updated to from version 7.29.1 to version 8.1.1 and Node.js 14 support has been discontinued (though, there are workarounds if Node.js 14 is still required)

  • The zplug package changes its output path from $out to $out/share/zplug. Users should update their dependency on ${pkgs.zplug}/init.zsh to ${pkgs.zplug}/share/zplug/init.zsh.

  • The pict-rs package was updated from an 0.3 alpha release to 0.3 stable, and related environment variables now require two underscores instead of one.

  • The shattered-pixel-dungeon game was updated from 1.1.2 to 2.0.2.

    • The location of game data has changed. To migrate it, run mv ~/.shatteredpixel ~/.local/share/.shatteredpixel

    • The update will delete all your in-progress games.

  • espanso has been updated to major version 2. Therefore, migration steps may need to be performed. See the official migration instructions for how to perform these migrations. Further, espanso-wayland can now be used for Wayland support.

  • Only k3s version 1.26 is included. Users of the k3s_1_24 or k3s_1_25 packages should upgrade to use the 1.26 version of the package.

  • The nerdfonts package has been updated to major version 3, which includes potential breaking changes.

Other Notable Changes

  • To follow RFC 0042 a few options of openssh have been moved from extraConfig to the new freeform option settings and renamed, e.g.:

    • services.openssh.forwardX11 to services.openssh.settings.X11Forwarding

    • services.openssh.kbdInteractiveAuthentication -> services.openssh.settings.KbdInteractiveAuthentication

    • services.openssh.passwordAuthentication to services.openssh.settings.PasswordAuthentication

    • services.openssh.useDns to services.openssh.settings.UseDns

    • services.openssh.permitRootLogin to services.openssh.settings.PermitRootLogin

    • services.openssh.logLevel to services.openssh.settings.LogLevel

    • services.openssh.kexAlgorithms to services.openssh.settings.KexAlgorithms

    • services.openssh.macs to services.openssh.settings.Macs

    • services.openssh.ciphers to services.openssh.settings.Ciphers

    • services.openssh.gatewayPorts to services.openssh.settings.GatewayPorts

  • vim_configurable has been renamed to vim-full to avoid confusion: vim-full’s build-time features are configurable, but both vim and vim-full are customizable (in the sense of user configuration, like vimrc).

  • Pantheon now defaults to Mutter 43 and GNOME settings daemon 43, all Pantheon packages are now tracking elementary OS 7 updates.

  • The module for the application firewall opensnitch got the ability to configure rules. Available as services.opensnitch.rules

  • The module usbmuxd now has the ability to change the package used by the daemon. In case you’re experiencing issues with usbmuxd you can try an alternative program like usbmuxd2. Available as services.usbmuxd.package

  • netbox was updated to 3.5. NixOS’ services.netbox.package still defaults to 3.3 if stateVersion is earlier than 23.05. Please review upstream’s breaking changes for 3.4.0 and for 3.5.0, and upgrade NetBox by changing services.netbox.package. Database migrations will be run automatically.

  • services.netbox now support RFC42-style options, through services.netbox.settings.

  • services.mastodon gained a tootctl wrapped named mastodon-tootctl similar to nextcloud-occ which can be executed from any user and switches to the configured mastodon user with sudo and sources the environment variables.

  • services.borgmatic now allows for multiple configurations, placed in /etc/borgmatic.d/, you can define them with services.borgmatic.configurations.

  • service.openafsServer features a new backup server pkgs.fabs as a replacement for openafs’s own buserver. See FABS to check if this is an viable replacement. It stores backups as volume dump files and thus better integrates into contemporary backup solutions.

  • services.maddy got several updates:

    • Configuration of users and their credentials using services.maddy.ensureCredentials.

    • TLS configuration is now possible via services.maddy.tls with two loaders present: ACME and file based.

  • The dnsmasq service now takes configuration via the services.dnsmasq.settings attribute set. The option services.dnsmasq.extraConfig will be deprecated when NixOS 22.11 reaches end of life.

  • The dokuwiki service is now configured via services.dokuwiki.sites.<name>.settings attribute set; extraConfig has been removed. The {aclUse,superUser,disableActions} attributes have been renamed accordingly. pluginsConfig now only accepts an attribute set of booleans. Passing plain PHP is no longer possible. Same applies to acl which now also only accepts structured settings.

  • The zsh package changes the way to set environment variables on NixOS systems where programs.zsh.enable equals false. It now sources /etc/set-environment when reading the system-level zshenv file. Before, it sourced /etc/profile when reading the system-level zprofile file.

  • The wordpress service now takes configuration via the services.wordpress.sites.<name>.settings attribute set, extraConfig is still available to append additional text to wp-config.php.

  • To reduce closure size in nixos/modules/profiles/minimal.nix profile disabled installation documentations and manuals. Also disabled logrotate and udisks2 services.

  • To reduce closure size in nixos/modules/installer/netboot/netboot-minimal.nix profile disabled load linux firmwares, pre-installing the complete stdenv and networking.wireless service.

  • The minimal ISO image now uses the nixos/modules/profiles/minimal.nix profile.

  • NixOS installer ISOs can now be built for powerpc64le-linux; see nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image-powerpc64le.nix and PR 192672. Hydra does not support this platform, so you must build the binaries yourself.

  • The ghcWithPackages and ghcWithHoogle wrappers will now also symlink GHC’s and all included libraries’ documentation to $out/share/doc for convenience. If undesired, the old behavior can be restored by overriding the builders with { installDocumentation = false; }.

  • The nftables module now validates its ruleset at build time. The new networking.nftables.checkRuleset option allows disabling this check, which may fail when rules have very specific requirements, that the sandbox environment, by default, will not cover. The networking.nftables.preCheckRuleset option can be used to prepare the environment before the checks are run.

  • The services.mastodon module now supports connection to a remote PostgreSQL database.

  • services.nextcloud.database.createLocally now uses socket authentication and is no longer compatible with password authentication.

  • services.nextcloud.config.objectstore.s3.sseCKeyFile is a new option to enable server-side encryption with customer provided keys (SSE-C) for your S3 in Nextcloud.

  • NixOS swap partitions with random encryption can now control the sector size, cipher, and key size used to set up the plain encryption device over the underlying block device rather than allowing them to be determined by cryptsetup(8). One can use these features like so:

    swapDevices = [ {
      device = "/dev/disk/by-partlabel/swapspace";
      randomEncryption = {
        enable = true;
        cipher = "aes-xts-plain64";
        keySize = 512;
        sectorSize = 4096;
      };
    } ];
    
  • New option security.pam.zfs to enable unlocking and mounting of encrypted ZFS home dataset at login.

  • services.peertube now requires you to specify the secret file secrets.secretsFile. It can be generated by running openssl rand -hex 32. Before upgrading, check the release notes for PeerTube v5.0.0.And backup your data.

  • services.chronyd is now started with additional systemd sandbox/hardening options for better security.

  • PostgreSQL has added opt-in support for JIT compilation. It can be enabled like this:

    services.postgresql.enableJIT = true;
    
  • services.netdata offers a services.netdata.deadlineBeforeStopSec option which will control the deadline (in seconds) after which systemd will consider your netdata instance as dead if it didn’t start in the elapsed time. It is helpful when your netdata instance takes longer to start because of a large amount of state or upgrades.

  • services.dhcpcd service stopped soliciting or accepting IPv6 Router Advertisements on interfaces that use static IPv6 addresses. If your network provides both IPv6 unique local addresses (ULA) and globally unique addresses (GUA) through autoconfiguration with SLAAC, you must add the parameter networking.dhcpcd.IPv6rs = true;.

  • The module services.headscale was refactored to be compliant with RFC 0042. To be precise, this means that the following things have changed:

  • services.kubo now unmounts ipfsMountDir and ipnsMountDir even if it is killed unexpectedly when autoMount is enabled.

  • services.grafana listens only on localhost by default again. This was changed to the upstream default of 0.0.0.0 by accident in the freeform setting conversion.

  • Grafana Tempo has been updated to version 2.0. See the upstream upgrade guide for migration instructions.

  • A new virtualisation.rosetta module was added to allow running x86_64 binaries through Rosetta inside virtualised NixOS guests on Apple Silicon. This feature works by default with the UTM virtualisation package.

  • The new option users.motdFile allows configuring a Message Of The Day that can be updated dynamically.

  • The root package is now built with the "-Dgnuinstall=ON" CMake flag, making the output conform the bin lib share layout. In this layout, tutorials is under share/doc/ROOT/; cmake, font, icons, js and macro under share/root; Makefile.comp and Makefile.config under etc/root.

  • There are various new options in the services.nginx module:

    • Enabling global redirect in services.nginx.virtualHosts now allows one to add exceptions with the locations option.

    • The proxyCachePath option has been added to services.nginx. It allows configuring the proxy_cache_path, that configures the storage path and various other settings for the cache.

    • A new option recommendedBrotliSettings has been added to services.nginx. Learn more about compression in Brotli format here.

    • services.nginx.recommendedProxySettings now removes the Connection header preventing clients from closing backend connections.

  • The nginx module also received an update to services.nginx.recommendedGzipSettings:

    • Enables gzip compression for only certain proxied requests.

    • Allow checking and loading of precompressed files.

    • Updated gzip mime-types.

    • Increased the minimum length of a response that will be gzipped.

  • Garage version is based on system.stateVersion, existing installations will keep using version 0.7. New installations will use version 0.8. In order to upgrade a Garage cluster, please follow upstream instructions and configure services.garage.package.

  • Nebula now supports the services.nebula.networks.<name>.isRelay and services.nebula.networks.<name>.relays configuration options for setting up or allowing traffic relaying. See the announcement for more details about relays.

  • Resilio sync secret keys can now be provided using a secrets file at runtime, preventing these secrets from ending up in the Nix store.

  • The firewall and nat modules can now optionally rely on an nftables based implementation. Enable networking.nftables to use it.

  • The services.fwupd module now allows arbitrary daemon settings to be configured in a structured manner (services.fwupd.daemonSettings).

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.phononBackend now defaults to vlc according to upstrean recommendation

  • The zramSwap is now implemented with zram-generator, and the option zramSwap.numDevices for using ZRAM devices as general purpose ephemeral block devices has been removed.

  • As Singularity has renamed to Apptainer to distinguish from an un-renamed fork by Sylabs Inc., there are now two packages of Singularity/Apptainer:

    • apptainer: From github.com/apptainer/apptainer, which is the new repo after renaming.

    • singularity: From github.com/sylabs/singularity, which is the fork by Sylabs Inc…

    singularity-tools.buildImage got a new input argument singularity to specify which package to use.

  • The new option programs.singularity.enableFakeroot, if set to true, provides --fakeroot support for apptainer and singularity.

  • The new option services.tailscale.useRoutingFeatures controls various settings for using Tailscale features like exit nodes and subnet routers. If you wish to use your machine as an exit node, you can set this setting to server, otherwise if you wish to use an exit node you can set this setting to client. The strict RPF warning has been removed as the RPF will be loosened automatically based on the value of this setting.

  • openjdk from version 11 and above is not build with openjfx (i.e.: JavaFX) support by default anymore. You can re-enable it by overriding, e.g.: openjdk11.override { enableJavaFX = true; };.

  • Xastir can now access AX.25 interfaces via the libax25 package.

  • nixos-version now accepts --configuration-revision to display more information about the current generation revision

  • The option services.nomad.extraSettingsPlugins has been fixed to allow more than one plugin in the path.

  • The option services.prometheus.exporters.pihole.interval does not exist anymore and has been removed.

  • The option services.gpsd.device has been replaced with services.gpsd.devices, which supports multiple devices.

  • k3s can now be configured with an EnvironmentFile for its systemd service, allowing secrets to be provided without ending up in the Nix Store.

  • The gitea module options have been moved into a freeform attribute set below services.gitea.settings.

  • boot.initrd.luks.device.<name> has a new tryEmptyPassphrase option, this is useful for OEMs who need to install an encrypted disk with a future settable passphrase

  • The bind module now allows the per-zone allow-query setting to be configured (previously it was hard-coded to any; it still defaults to any to retain compatibility).

  • The option services.jitsi-videobridge.apis has been renamed to colibriRestApi and turned into a boolean. Setting it to true will enable the private rest API, useful for monitoring using services.prometheus.exporters.jitsi.enable. Learn more about the API: “The COLIBRI control interface (/colibri/)”.

  • Booting from a volume managed by the Stratis storage management daemon is now supported. Use fileSystems.<name>.stratis.poolUuid to configure the pool containing the fs.

Nixpkgs internals

  • buildDunePackage now defaults to strictDeps = true which means that any library should go into buildInputs or checkInputs. Any executable that is run on the building machine should go into nativeBuildInputs or nativeCheckInputs respectively. Example of executables are ocaml, findlib and menhir. PPXs are libraries which are built by dune and should therefore not go into nativeBuildInputs.

  • buildFHSUserEnv is now called buildFHSEnv and uses FlatPak’s Bubblewrap sandboxing tool rather than Nixpkgs’ own chrootenv. The old chrootenv-based implementation is still available via buildFHSEnvChroot but is considered deprecated and will be removed when the remaining uses inside Nixpkgs have been migrated. If your FHSEnv-wrapped application misbehaves when using the new bubblewrap implementation, please create an issue in Nixpkgs.

  • Top-level buildPlatform, hostPlatform, targetPlatform have been deprecated, use stdenv.X instead.

  • carnix and cratesIO has been removed due to being unmaintained, use alternatives such as naersk and crate2nix instead.

  • checkInputs have been renamed to nativeCheckInputs, because they behave the same as nativeBuildInputs when doCheck is set. checkInputs now denote a new type of dependencies, added to buildInputs when doCheck is set. As a rule of thumb, nativeCheckInputs are tools on $PATH used during the tests, and checkInputs are libraries which are linked to executables built as part of the tests. Similarly, installCheckInputs are renamed to nativeInstallCheckInputs, corresponding to nativeBuildInputs, and installCheckInputs are a new type of dependencies added to buildInputs when doInstallCheck is set. (Note that this change will not cause breakage to derivations with strictDeps unset, which are most packages except python, rust, ocaml and go packages).

  • DocBook option documentation, which has been deprecated since 22.11, will now cause a warning when documentation is built. Out-of-tree modules should migrate to using CommonMark documentation as outlined in the section called “Option Declarations” to silence this warning.

    DocBook option documentation support will be removed in the next release and CommonMark will become the default. DocBook option documentation that has not been migrated until then will no longer render properly or cause errors.

  • lib.systems.examples.ghcjs and consequently pkgsCross.ghcjs now use the target triplet javascript-unknown-ghcjs instead of js-unknown-ghcjs. This has been done to match an upstream decision to follow Cabal’s platform naming more closely. Nixpkgs will also reject js as an architecture name.

  • Lisp gained a manual section, documenting a new and backwards incompatible interface. The previous interface will be removed in a future release.

  • Calling makeSetupHook without passing a name argument is deprecated.

  • nixos/lib/make-disk-image.nix handles contents arguments that are directories better, fixing a bug where it used to put them in a subdirectory of the intended target.

  • nixos/lib/make-disk-image.nix can now mutate EFI variables, run user-provided EFI firmware or variable templates. This is now extensively documented in the NixOS manual.

  • Nixpkgs now uses IEEE-standard floating point arithmetic on powerpc64le-linux.

  • Deprecated xlibsWrapper transitional package has been removed in favour of direct use of its constituents: xorg.libX11, freetype and others.

Detailed migration information

Pipewire configuration overrides

Why this change?

The Pipewire config semantics don’t really match the NixOS module semantics, so it’s extremely awkward to override the default config, especially when lists are involved. Vendoring the configuration files in nixpkgs also creates unnecessary maintenance overhead.

Also, upstream added a lot of accommodations to allow doing most of the things you’d want to do with a config edit in better ways.

Migrating your configuration

Compare your settings to the defaults and where your configuration differs from them.

Then, create a drop-in JSON file in /etc/pipewire/<config file name>.d/99-custom.conf (the actual filename can be anything) and migrate your changes to it according to the following sections.

Repeat for every file you’ve modified, changing the directory name accordingly.

Things you can just copy over

If you are:

  • setting properties via *.properties

  • loading a new module to context.modules

  • creating new objects with context.objects

  • declaring SPA libraries with context.spa-libs

  • running custom commands with context.exec

  • adding new rules with *.rules

  • running custom PulseAudio commands with pulse.cmd

Move the definitions into the drop-in.

Note that the use of context.exec is not recommended and other methods of running your thing are likely a better option.

{
  "context.properties": {
    "your.property.name": "your.property.value"
  },
  "context.modules": [
    { "name": "libpipewire-module-my-cool-thing" }
  ],
  "context.objects": [
    { "factory": { ... } }
  ],
  "alsa.rules": [
    { "matches: { ... }, "actions": { ... } }
  ]
}
Removing a module from context.modules

Look for an option to disable it via context.properties ("module.x11.bell": "false" is likely the most common use case here). If one is not available, proceed to Nuclear option.

Modifying a module’s parameters in context.modules

For most modules (e.g. libpipewire-module-rt) it’s enough to load the module again with the new arguments, e.g.:

{
  "context.modules": [
    {
      "name": "libpipewire-module-rt",
      "args": {
        "rt.prio": 90
      }
    }
  ]
}

Note that module-rt specifically will generally use the highest values available by default, so setting limits on the pipewire systemd service is preferable to reloading.

If reloading the module is not an option, proceed to Nuclear option.

Nuclear option

If all else fails, you can still manually copy the contents of the default configuration file from ${pkgs.pipewire}/share/pipewire to /etc/pipewire and edit it to fully override the default. However, this should be done only as a last resort. Please talk to the Pipewire maintainers if you ever need to do this.

Release 22.11 (“Raccoon”, 2022.11/30)

The NixOS release team is happy to announce a new version of NixOS 22.11. NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS.

This release is supported until the end of June 2023, handing over to NixOS 23.05.

To upgrade to the latest release follow the upgrade chapter.

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release includes the following highlights:

  • Software that uses the crypt password hashing API is now using the implementation provided by libxcrypt instead of glibc’s, which enables support for more secure algorithms.

    • Support for algorithms that libxcrypt does not consider strong are deprecated as of this release, and will be removed in NixOS 23.05.

    • This includes system login passwords. Given this, we strongly encourage all users to update their system passwords, as you will be unable to login if password hashes are not migrated by the time their support is removed.

      • When using users.users.<name>.hashedPassword to configure user passwords, run mkpasswd, and use the yescrypt hash that is provided as the new value.

      • On the other hand, for interactively configured user passwords, re-set the passwords for all users with passwd.

      • This release introduces warnings for the use of deprecated hash algorithms for both methods of configuring passwords. To make sure you migrated correctly, run nixos-rebuild switch.

  • The NixOS documentation is now generated from markdown. While docbook is still part of the documentation build process, it’s a big step towards the full migration.

  • aarch64-linux is now included in the nixos-22.11 and nixos-22.11-small channels. This means that when those channel update, both x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux will be available in the binary cache.

  • aarch64-linux ISOs are now available on the downloads page.

  • nsncd is now available as a replacement of nscd.

    nscd is responsible for resolving hostnames, users and more in NixOS and has been a long standing source of bugs, such as sporadic network freezes.

    More context in this issue.

    Help us test the new implementation by setting services.nscd.enableNsncd to true.

    We plan to use nsncd by default in NixOS 23.05.

  • Linode cloud images are now supported by importing ${modulesPath}/virtualisation/linode-image.nix and accessing system.build.linodeImage on the output.

  • hardware.nvidia has a new option, hardware.nvidia.open, that can be used to enable the usage of NVIDIA’s open-source kernel driver. Note that the driver’s support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs is still alpha quality, see the release announcement for more information.

  • The emacs package now makes use of native compilation which means:

    • Emacs packages from Nixpkgs, builtin or not, will do native compilation ahead of time so you can enjoy the benefit of native compilation without compiling them on you machine;

    • Emacs packages from somewhere else, e.g. package-install, will perform asynchronously deferred native compilation. If you do not want this, maybe to avoid CPU consumption for compilation, you can use (setq native-comp-deferred-compilation nil) to disable it while still benefiting from native compilation for packages from Nixpkgs.

Internal changes

  • Haskell ghcWithPackages is now up to 15 times faster to evaluate, thanks to changing lib.closePropagation from a quadratic to linear complexity. Please see backward incompatibilities notes below. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/194391

  • For cross-compilation targets that can also run on the building machine, we now run tests. This, for example, is the case for the pkgsStatic and pkgsLLVM package sets or i686 packages on x86_64 machines.

  • To simplify cross-compilation in NixOS, this release introduces the nixpkgs.hostPlatform and nixpkgs.buildPlatform options. These cover and override the nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem} options.

    • hostPlatform is the platform or “system” string of the NixOS system described by the configuration.

    • buildPlatform is the platform that is responsible for building the NixOS configuration. It defaults to the hostPlatform, for a non-cross build configuration. To cross compile, set buildPlatform to a different value.

    The new options convey the same information, but with fewer options, and following the Nixpkgs terminology.

    The existing options nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem} have not been formally deprecated, to allow for evaluation of the change and to allow for a transition period so that in time the ecosystem can switch without breaking compatibility with any supported NixOS release.

Notable version updates

  • Nix has been upgraded from v2.8.1 to v2.11.0. For more information, please see the release notes for 2.9, 2.10 and 2.11.

  • OpenSSL now defaults to OpenSSL 3, updated from 1.1.1.

  • GNOME has been upgraded to version 43. Please see the release notes for details.

  • KDE Plasma has been upgraded from v5.24 to v5.26. Please see the release notes for v5.25 and v5.26 for more details on the included changes.

  • Cinnamon has been updated to 5.4, and the Cinnamon module now defaults to Blueman as the Bluetooth manager and slick-greeter as the LightDM greeter, to match upstream.

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 8.1, updated from 8.0.

  • Perl has been updated to 5.36, and its core module HTTP::Tiny was patched to verify SSL/TLS certificates by default.

  • Python now defaults to 3.10, updated from 3.9.

Backward Incompatibilities

  • Nixpkgs now requires Nix 2.3 or newer.

  • The isCompatible predicate checking CPU compatibility is no longer exposed by the platform sets generated using lib.systems.elaborate. In most cases you will want to use the new canExecute predicate instead which also takes the kernel / syscall interface into account. lib.systems.parse.isCompatible still exists, but has changed semantically: Architectures with differing endianness modes are no longer considered compatible.

  • ngrok has been upgraded from 2.3.40 to 3.0.4. Please see the upgrade guide and changelog. Notably, breaking changes are that the config file format has changed and support for single hyphen arguments was dropped.

  • i18n.supportedLocales is now only generated with the locales set in i18n.defaultLocale and i18n.extraLocaleSettings.

    • This reduces the final system closure size by up to 200MB.

    • If you require all locales installed, set the option to [ "all" ].

  • Deprecated settings logrotate.paths and logrotate.extraConfig have been removed. Please convert any uses to services.logrotate.settings instead.

  • The isPowerPC predicate, found on platform attrsets (hostPlatform, buildPlatform, targetPlatform, etc) has been removed in order to reduce confusion. The predicate was was defined such that it matches only the 32-bit big-endian members of the POWER/PowerPC family, despite having a name which would imply a broader set of systems. If you were using this predicate, you can replace foo.isPowerPC with (with foo; isPower && is32bit && isBigEndian).

  • The fetchgit fetcher now uses cone mode by default for sparse checkouts. Non-cone mode can be enabled by passing nonConeMode = true, but note that non-cone mode is deprecated and this option may be removed alongside a future Git update without notice.

  • The fetchgit fetcher supports sparse checkouts via the sparseCheckout option. This used to accept a multi-line string with directories/patterns to check out, but now requires a list of strings.

  • openssh was updated to version 9.1, disabling the generation of DSA keys when using ssh-keygen -A as they are insecure. Also, SetEnv directives in ssh_config and sshd_config are now first-match-wins.

  • bsp-layout no longer uses the command cycle to switch to other window layouts, as it got replaced by the commands previous and next.

  • The Barco ClickShare driver/client package pkgs.clickshare-csc1 and the option programs.clickshare-csc1.enable have been removed, as it requires qt4, which reached its end-of-life 2015 and will no longer be supported by nixpkgs. According to Barco many of their base unit models can be used with Google Chrome and the Google Cast extension.

  • services.hbase has been renamed to services.hbase-standalone. For production HBase clusters, use services.hadoop.hbase instead.

  • The p4 package now only includes the open-source Perforce Helix Core command-line client and APIs. It no longer installs the unfree Helix Core Server binaries p4d, p4broker, and p4p. To install the Helix Core Server binaries, use the p4d package instead.

  • The OpenSSL extension for the PHP interpreter used by Nextcloud is built against OpenSSL 1.1 if system.stateVersion is below 22.11. This is to make sure that people using server-side encryption don’t lose access to their files.

    In any other case, it’s safe to use OpenSSL 3 for PHP’s OpenSSL extension. This can be done by setting services.nextcloud.enableBrokenCiphersForSSE to false.

  • The coq package and versioned variants starting at coq_8_14 no longer include CoqIDE, which is now available through coqPackages.coqide. It is still possible to get CoqIDE as part of the coq package by overriding the buildIde argument of the derivation.

  • PHP 7.4 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 22.11 release.

  • The ipfs package and module were renamed to kubo. The kubo module now uses an RFC42-style settings option instead of extraConfig and the gatewayAddress, apiAddress and swarmAddress options were renamed. Using the old names will print a warning but still work.

  • pkgs.cosign does not provide the cosigned binary anymore. The sget binary has been moved into its own package.

  • Emacs now uses the Lucid toolkit by default instead of GTK because of stability and compatibility issues. Users who still wish to remain using GTK can do so by using emacs-gtk.

  • kanidm has been updated to 1.1.0-alpha.10 and now requires a TLS certificate and key. It will always start https and-–-if enabled-–-an LDAPS server and no HTTP and LDAP server anymore.

  • riak package removed along with services.riak module, due to lack of maintainer to update the package.

  • ppd files in pkgs.cups-drv-rastertosag-gdi are now gzipped. If you refer to such a ppd file with its path (e.g. via hardware.printers.ensurePrinters) you will need to append .gz to the path.

  • xow package removed along with the hardware.xow module, due to the project being deprecated in favor of xone, which is available via the hardware.xone module.

  • dd-agent package removed along with the services.dd-agent module, due to the project being deprecated in favor of datadog-agent, which is available via the services.datadog-agent module.

  • teleport has been upgraded to major version 10. Please see upstream upgrade instructions and release notes.

  • lib.closePropagation now needs that all gathered sets have an outPath attribute.

  • lemmy module option services.lemmy.settings.database.createLocally moved to services.lemmy.database.createLocally.

  • virtlyst package and services.virtlyst module removed, due to lack of maintainers.

  • The nix.checkConfig option now fully disables the config check. The new nix.checkAllErrors option behaves like nix.checkConfig previously did.

  • generateOptparseApplicativeCompletions and generateOptparseApplicativeCompletion from haskell.lib.compose (and haskell.lib) have been deprecated in favor of generateOptparseApplicativeCompletions (plural!) as provided by the haskell package sets (so haskellPackages.generateOptparseApplicativeCompletions etc.). The latter allows for cross-compilation (by automatically disabling generation of completion in the cross case). For it to work properly you need to make sure that the function comes from the same context as the package you are trying to override, i.e. always use the same package set as your package is coming from or – even better – use self.generateOptparseApplicativeCompletions if you are overriding a haskell package set. The old functions are retained for backwards compatibility, but yield are warning.

  • The services.graphite.api and services.graphite.beacon NixOS options, and the python3.pkgs.graphite_api, python3.pkgs.graphite_beacon and python3.pkgs.influxgraph packages, have been removed due to lack of upstream maintenance.

  • The trace binary from perf-linux package has been removed, due to being a duplicate of the perf binary.

  • The aws package has been removed due to being abandoned by the upstream. It is recommended to use awscli or awscli2 instead.

  • The CEmu TI-84 Plus CE emulator package has been renamed to cemu-ti. The Cemu Wii U emulator is now packaged as cemu.

  • systemd-networkd v250 deprecated, renamed, and moved some sections and settings which leads to the following breaking module changes:

    • systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcpV6PrefixDelegationConfig is renamed to systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcpPrefixDelegationConfig.

    • systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcpV6Config no longer accepts the ForceDHCPv6PDOtherInformation= setting. Please use the WithoutRA= and UseDelegatedPrefix= settings in your systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcpV6Config and the DHCPv6Client= setting in your systemd.network.networks.<name>.ipv6AcceptRAConfig to control when the DHCPv6 client is started and how the delegated prefixes are handled by the DHCPv6 client.

    • systemd.network.networks.<name>.networkConfig no longer accepts the IPv6Token= setting. Use the Token= setting in your systemd.network.networks.<name>.ipv6AcceptRAConfig instead. The systemd.network.networks.<name>.ipv6Prefixes.*.ipv6PrefixConfig now also accepts the Token= setting.

  • arangodb versions 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5 have been removed because they are at EOL upstream. The default is now 3.10.0. Support for aarch64-linux has been removed since the target cannot be built reproducibly. By default arangodb is now built for the haswell architecture. If you wish to build for a different architecture, you may override the targetArchitecture argument with a value from this list supported upstream. Some architecture specific optimizations are also conditionally enabled. You may alter this behavior by overriding the asmOptimizations parameter. You may also add additional architecture support by adding more -DHAS_XYZ flags to cmakeFlags via overrideAttrs.

  • The meta.mainProgram attribute of packages in wineWowPackages now defaults to "wine64".

  • The paperless module now defaults PAPERLESS_TIME_ZONE to your configured system timezone.

  • The top-level termonad-with-packages alias for termonad has been removed.

  • Linux 4.9 has been removed because it will reach its end of life within the lifespan of 22.11.

  • (Neo)Vim can not be configured with configure.pathogen anymore to reduce maintenance burden. Use configure.packages instead.

  • Neovim can not be configured with plug anymore (still works for vim).

  • The adguardhome module no longer uses host and port options, use settings.bind_host and settings.bind_port instead.

  • The default kops version is now 1.25.1 and support for 1.22 and older has been dropped.

  • The zrepl package has been updated from 0.5.0 to 0.6.0. See the changelog for details.

  • k3s no longer supports Docker as runtime due to upstream dropping support.

  • cassandra_2_1 and cassandra_2_2 have been removed. Please update to cassandra_3_11 or cassandra_3_0. See the changelog for more information about the upgrade process.

  • mysql57 has been removed. Please update to mysql80 or mariadb. See the upgrade guide for more information.

  • Consequently, cqrlog and amorok now use mariadb instead of mysql57 for their embedded databases. Running mysql_upgrade may be necessary.

  • k3s supports clusterInit option, and it is enabled by default, for servers.

  • percona-server56 has been removed. Please migrate to mysql or mariadb if possible.

  • obs-studio hase been updated to version 28. If you have packaged custom plugins, check if they are compatible. obs-websocket has been integrated into obs-studio.

  • signald has been bumped to 0.23.0. For the upgrade, a migration process is necessary. It can be done by running a command like this before starting signald.service:

    signald -d /var/lib/signald/db \
      --database sqlite:/var/lib/signald/db \
      --migrate-data
    

    For further information, please read the upstream changelogs.

  • stylua no longer accepts lua52Support and luauSupport overrides. Use features instead, which defaults to [ "lua54" "luau" ].

  • ocamlPackages.ocaml_extlib has been renamed to ocamlPackages.extlib.

  • pkgs.fetchNextcloudApp has been rewritten to circumvent impurities in e.g. tarballs from GitHub and to make it easier to apply patches. This means that your hashes are out-of-date and the (previously required) attributes name and version are no longer accepted.

  • The Syncthing service now only allows absolute paths—starting with / or ~/—for services.syncthing.folders.<name>.path. In a future release other paths will be allowed again and interpreted relative to services.syncthing.dataDir.

  • services.github-runner and services.github-runners.<name> gained the option serviceOverrides which allows overriding the systemd serviceConfig. If you have been overriding the systemd service configuration (i.e., by defining systemd.services.github-runner.serviceConfig), you have to use the serviceOverrides option now. Example:

    services.github-runner.serviceOverrides.SupplementaryGroups = [
      "docker"
    ];
    

Other Notable Changes

  • PHP is now built in NTS (Non-Thread Safe) mode by default.

    • For Apache and mod_php usage, we enable ZTS (Zend Thread Safe) mode. This has been a common practice for a long time in other distributions.

  • firefox, thunderbird and librewolf now come with Wayland support by default. The firefox-wayland, firefox-esr-wayland, thunderbird-wayland and librewolf-wayland attributes are obsolete and have been aliased to their generic attribute.

  • The xplr package has been updated from 0.18.0 to 0.19.0, which brings some breaking changes. See the upstream release notes for more details.

  • Configuring multiple GitHub runners is now possible through services.github-runners.<name>. The options under services.github-runner remain, to configure a single runner.

  • github-runner gained support for ephemeral runners and registrations using a personal access token (PAT) instead of a registration token. See services.github-runner.ephemeral and services.github-runner.tokenFile for details.

  • A new module was added to provide hardware support for the Saleae Logic device family, providing the options hardware.saleae-logic.enable and hardware.saleae-logic.package.

  • ZFS module will no longer allow hibernation by default.

    • This is a safety measure to prevent data loss cases like the ones described at OpenZFS/260 and OpenZFS/12842.

    • Use the boot.zfs.allowHibernation option to configure this behaviour.

  • Mastodon now automatically removes remote media attachments older than 30 days. This is configurable through services.mastodon.mediaAutoRemove.

  • The Redis module now disables RDB persistence when services.redis.servers.<name>.save = [] instead of using the Redis default.

  • Neo4j was updated from version 3 to version 4. See upstream’s migration guide for information on how to migrate your instance.

  • The networking.wireguard module now can set the mtu on interfaces and tag its packets with an fwmark.

  • The option overrideStrategy was added to the different systemd unit options (systemd.services.<name>, systemd.sockets.<name>, …) to allow enforcing the creation of a dropin file, rather than the main unit file, by setting it to asDropin. This is useful in cases where the existence of the main unit file is not known to Nix at evaluation time, for example when the main unit file is provided by adding a package to systemd.packages. See the fix proposed in NixOS’s systemd abstraction doesn’t work with systemd template units for an example.

  • The polymc package has been removed due to a rogue maintainer. It has been replaced by prismlauncher, a fork by the rest of the maintainers. For more details, see the PR that made this change and the issue detailing the vulnerability. Users with existing installations should rename ~/.local/share/polymc to ~/.local/share/PrismLauncher. The main config file’s path has also moved from ~/.local/share/polymc/polymc.cfg to ~/.local/share/PrismLauncher/prismlauncher.cfg.

  • The bloat package has been updated from unstable-2022-03-31 to unstable-2022-10-25, which brings a breaking change. See this upstream commit message for details.

  • Synapse’s systemd unit has been hardened.

  • The module services.grafana was refactored to be compliant with RFC 0042. To be precise, this means that the following things have changed:

  • The services.grafana.provision.alerting option was added. It includes suboptions for every alerting-related objects (with the exception of notifiers), which means it’s now possible to configure modern Grafana alerting declaratively.

  • Synapse now requires entries in the state_group_edges table to be unique, in order to prevent accidentally introducing duplicate information (for example, because a database backup was restored multiple times). If your Synapse database already has duplicate rows in this table, this could fail with an error and require manual remediation.

  • The diamond package has been update from 0.8.36 to 2.0.15. See the upstream release notes for more details.

  • The guake package has been updated from 3.6.3 to 3.9.0, see the changelog for more details.

  • The netlify-cli package has been updated from 6.13.2 to 12.2.4, see the changelog for more details.

  • dockerTools.buildImage’s contents parameter has been deprecated in favor of copyToRoot. Use copyToRoot = buildEnv { ... }; or similar if you intend to add packages to /bin.

  • The proxmox.qemuConf.bios option was added, it corresponds to Hardware->BIOS field in Proxmox web interface. Use "ovmf" value to build UEFI image, default value remains "bios". New option proxmox.partitionTableType defaults to either "legacy" or "efi", depending on the bios value. Setting partitionTableType to "hybrid" results in an image, which supports both methods ("bios" and "ovmf"), thereby remaining bootable after change to Proxmox Hardware->BIOS field.

  • memtest86+ was updated from 5.00-coreboot-002 to 6.00-beta2. It is now the upstream version from https://www.memtest.org/, as coreboot’s fork is no longer available.

  • Option descriptions, examples, and defaults writing in DocBook are now deprecated. Using CommonMark is preferred and will become the default in a future release.

  • The documentation.nixos.options.allowDocBook option was added to ease the transition to CommonMark option documentation. Setting this option to false causes an error for every option included in the manual that uses DocBook documentation; it defaults to true to preserve the previous behavior and will be removed once the transition to CommonMark is complete.

  • The Redis module now persists each instance’s configuration file in the state directory, in order to support some more advanced use cases like Sentinel.

  • protonup has been aliased to and replaced by protonup-ng due to upstream not maintaining it.

  • The udisks2 service, available at services.udisks2.enable, is now disabled by default. It will automatically be enabled through services and desktop environments as needed. This also means that polkit will now actually be disabled by default. The default for security.polkit.enable was already flipped in the previous release, but udisks2 being enabled by default re-enabled it.

  • Nextcloud has been updated to version 25. Additionally the following things have changed for Nextcloud in NixOS:

    • For Nextcloud >=24, the default PHP version is 8.1.

    • Nextcloud 23 has been removed since it will reach its end of life in December 2022.

    • If system.stateVersion is >=22.11, Nextcloud 25 will be installed by default. For older versions, Nextcloud 24 will be installed.

    • Please ensure that you only upgrade one major release at a time! Nextcloud doesn’t support upgrades across multiple versions, i.e. an upgrade from 23 to 25 is only possible when upgrading to 24 first.

  • systemd-oomd is enabled by default. Depending on which systemd units have ManagedOOMSwap=kill or ManagedOOMMemoryPressure=kill, systemd-oomd will SIGKILL all the processes under the appropriate descendant cgroups when the configured limits are exceeded. NixOS does currently not configure cgroups with oomd by default, this can be enabled using systemd.oomd.enableRootSlice, systemd.oomd.enableSystemSlice, and systemd.oomd.enableUserServices.

  • The tt-rss service performs two database migrations when you first use its web UI after upgrade. Consider backing up its database before updating.

  • The pass-secret-service package now includes systemd units from upstream, so adding it to the NixOS services.dbus.packages option will make it start automatically as a systemd user service when an application tries to talk to the libsecret D-Bus API.

  • The Wordpress module now has support for installing language packs through a new option, services.wordpress.sites.<site>.languages.

  • The default package for services.mullvad-vpn.package was changed to pkgs.mullvad, allowing cross-platform usage of Mullvad. pkgs.mullvad only contains the Mullvad CLI tool, so users who rely on the Mullvad GUI will want to change it back to pkgs.mullvad-vpn, or add pkgs.mullvad-vpn to their environment.

  • PowerDNS has been updated from v4.6.2 to v4.7.2. Please be sure to review the Upgrade Notes provided by upstream before upgrading. Worth specifically noting is that the new Catalog Zones feature comes with a mandatory schema change for the GSQL database backends, which has to be manually applied.

  • There is a new module for the thunar program (the Xfce file manager), which depends on the xfconf dbus service, and also has a dbus service and a systemd unit. The option services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.thunarPlugins has been renamed to programs.thunar.plugins, and may be removed in a future release.

  • There is a new module for xfconf (the Xfce configuration storage system), which has a dbus service.

  • The Mastodon package has been upgraded to v4.0.0. See the v4.0.0 release notes for a list of changes. On standard setups, no manual migration steps are required. Nevertheless, a database backup is recommended.

  • The nomad package now defaults to v1.3, which no longer has a downgrade path to v1.2 or older.

  • The nodePackages package set now defaults to the LTS release in the nodejs package again, instead of being pinned to nodejs-14_x. Several updates to node2nix have been made for compatibility with newer Node.js and npm versions and a new postRebuild hook has been added for packages to perform extra build steps before the npm install step prunes dev dependencies.

  • boot.kernel.sysctl is defined as a freeformType and adds a custom merge option for net.core.rmem_max (taking the highest value defined to avoid conflicts between 2 services trying to set that value).

  • The mame package does not ship with its tools anymore in the default output. They were moved to a separate tools output instead. For convenience, mame-tools package was added for those who want to use it.

  • A NixOS module for Firefox has been added which allows preferences and policies to be set. This also allows extensions to be installed via the ExtensionSettings policy. The new options are under programs.firefox.

  • The option services.picom.experimentalBackends was removed since it is now the default and the option will cause picom to quit instead.

  • haskellPackages.callHackage is not always invalidated if all-cabal-hashes changes, leading to less rebuilds of haskell dependencies.

  • haskellPackages.callHackage and haskellPackages.callCabal2nix (and related functions) no longer keep a reference to the cabal2nix call used to generate them. As a result, they will be garbage collected more often.

New Services

Release 22.05 (“Quokka”, 2022.05/30)

  • Support is planned until the end of December 2022, handing over to 22.11.

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Nix has been updated from 2.3 to 2.8. This mainly brings experimental support for Flakes, but also marks the nix command as experimental which now has to be enabled via the configuration explicitly. For more information and instructions for upgrades, see the release notes for nix-2.4, nix-2.5, nix-2.6, nix-2.7 and nix-2.8

  • The firefox browser on x86_64-linux now makes use of profile-guided optimisation, resulting in a much more responsive browsing experience.

  • GNOME has been upgraded to 42. Please take a look at their Release Notes for details. In particular, it replaces gedit with GNOME Text Editor, GNOME Terminal with GNOME Console (formerly King’s Cross) and GNOME Screenshot by a tool integrated into the Shell.

  • PHP 8.1 is now available.

  • systemd services can now set systemd.services.<name>.reloadTriggers instead of reloadIfChanged for a more granular distinction between reloads and restarts.

  • Systemd has been upgraded to the version 250.

  • Pulseaudio has been updated to version 15.0 and now optionally supports additional Bluetooth audio codecs such as aptX or LDAC, with codec switching available in pavucontrol. This feature is disabled by default, but can be enabled with the option hardware.pulseaudio.package = pkgs.pulseaudioFull;. Existing third-party modules that offered similar functions, such as pulseaudio-modules-bt or pulseaudio-hsphfpd, are obsolete and have been removed.

  • PostgreSQL now defaults to major version 14.

  • Module authors can use mkRenamedOptionModuleWith to automate the deprecation cycle without annoying out-of-tree module authors and their users.

  • The default GHC version has been updated from 8.10.7 to 9.0.2. pkgs.haskellPackages and pkgs.ghc will now use this version by default.

  • The GNOME and Plasma installation CDs now use pkgs.calamares and pkgs.calamares-nixos-extensions to allow users to easily install and set up NixOS with a GUI.

  • security.acme.defaults has been added to simplify the configuration of settings for many certificates at once. This also opens up the option to use DNS-01 validation when using enableACME web server virtual hosts (e.g. services.nginx.virtualHosts.*.enableACME).

New Services

Backward Incompatibilities

  • pkgs.ghc now refers to pkgs.targetPackages.haskellPackages.ghc. This only makes a difference if you are cross-compiling and will ensure that pkgs.ghc always runs on the host platform and compiles for the target platform (similar to pkgs.gcc for example). haskellPackages.ghc still behaves as before, running on the build platform and compiling for the host platform (similar to stdenv.cc). This means you don’t have to adjust your derivations if you use haskellPackages.callPackage, but when using pkgs.callPackage and taking ghc as an input, you should now use buildPackages.ghc instead to ensure cross compilation keeps working (or switch to haskellPackages.callPackage).

  • pkgs.ghc.withPackages as well as haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages etc. now needs be overridden directly, as opposed to overriding the result of calling it. Additionally, the withLLVM parameter has been renamed to useLLVM. So instead of (ghc.withPackages (p: [])).override { withLLVM = true; }, one needs to use (ghc.withPackages.override { useLLVM = true; }) (p: []).

  • The update of the haskell package set brings with it a new version of the xmonad module, which will break your configuration if you use launch as entrypoint. The example code the corresponding nixos module was adjusted, you may want to have a look at it.

  • The home-assistant module now requires users that don’t want their configuration to be managed declaratively to set services.home-assistant.config = null;. This is required due to the way default settings are handled with the new settings style.

    Additionally the default list of extraComponents now includes the minimal dependencies to successfully complete the onboarding procedure.

  • pkgs.emacsPackages.orgPackages is removed because org elpa is deprecated. The packages in the top level of pkgs.emacsPackages, such as org and org-contrib, refer to the ones in pkgs.emacsPackages.elpaPackages and pkgs.emacsPackages.nongnuPackages where the new versions will release.

  • The configuration and state directories used by nixos-containers have been moved from /etc/containers and /var/lib/containers to /etc/nixos-containers and /var/lib/nixos-containers.

    If you are changing system.stateVersion to "22.05" manually on an existing system you are responsible for migrating these directories yourself.

    This is to improve compatibility with libcontainer based software such as Podman and Skopeo which assumes they have ownership over /etc/containers.

  • lib.systems.supported has been removed, as it was overengineered for determining the systems to support in the nixpkgs flake. The list of systems exposed by the nixpkgs flake can now be accessed as lib.systems.flakeExposed.

  • For new installations virtualisation.oci-containers.backend is now set to podman by default. If you still want to use Docker on systems where system.stateVersion is set to to "22.05" set virtualisation.oci-containers.backend = "docker";.Old systems with older stateVersions stay with “docker”.

  • security.klogd was removed. Logging of kernel messages is handled by systemd since Linux 3.5.

  • pkgs.ssmtp has been dropped due to the program being unmaintained. pkgs.msmtp can be used instead as a substitute sendmail implementation. The corresponding options services.ssmtp.* have been removed as well. programs.msmtp.* can be used instead for an equivalent setup. For example:

    {
      # Original ssmtp configuration:
      services.ssmtp = {
        enable = true;
        useTLS = true;
        useSTARTTLS = true;
        hostName = "smtp.example:587";
        authUser = "someone";
        authPassFile = "/secrets/password.txt";
      };
    
      # Equivalent msmtp configuration:
      programs.msmtp = {
        enable = true;
        accounts.default = {
          tls = true;
          tls_starttls = true;
          auth = true;
          host = "smtp.example";
          port = 587;
          user = "someone";
          passwordeval = "cat /secrets/password.txt";
        };
      };
    }
    
  • services.kubernetes.addons.dashboard was removed due to it being an outdated version.

  • services.kubernetes.scheduler.{port,address} now set --secure-port and --bind-address instead of --port and --address, since the former have been deprecated and are no longer functional in kubernetes>=1.23. Ensure that you are not relying on the insecure behaviour before upgrading.

  • In the PowerDNS Recursor module (services.pdns-recursor), default values of several IP address-related NixOS options have been updated to match the default upstream behavior. In particular, Recursor by default will:

    • listen on (and allows connections from) both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (services.pdns-recursor.dns.address, services.pdns-recursor.dns.allowFrom);

    • allow only local connections to the REST API server (services.pdns-recursor.api.allowFrom).

  • In the ncdns module, the default value of services.ncdns.address has been changed to the IPv6 loopback address (::1).

  • openldap (and therefore the slapd LDAP server) were updated to version 2.6.2. The project introduced backwards-incompatible changes, namely the removal of the bdb, hdb, ndb, and shell backends in slapd. Therefore before updating, dump your database slapcat -n 1 in LDIF format, and reimport it after updating your services.openldap.settings, which represents your cn=config.

    Additionally with 2.5 the argon2 module was included in the standard distribution and renamed from pw-argon2 to argon2. Remember to update your olcModuleLoad entry in cn=config.

  • openssh has been update to 8.9p1, changing the FIDO security key middleware interface.

  • git no longer hardcodes the path to openssh’ ssh binary to reduce the amount of rebuilds. If you are using git with ssh remotes and do not have a ssh binary in your environment consider adding openssh to it or switching to gitFull.

  • services.k3s.enable no longer implies systemd.enableUnifiedCgroupHierarchy = false, and will default to the ‘systemd’ cgroup driver when using services.k3s.docker = true. This change may require a reboot to take effect, and k3s may not be able to run if the boot cgroup hierarchy does not match its configuration. The previous behavior may be retained by explicitly setting systemd.enableUnifiedCgroupHierarchy = false in your configuration.

  • fonts.fonts no longer includes ancient bitmap fonts when both config.services.xserver.enable and config.nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree are enabled. If you still want these fonts, use:

    {
      fonts.fonts = [
        pkgs.xorg.fontbhlucidatypewriter100dpi
        pkgs.xorg.fontbhlucidatypewriter75dpi
        pkgs.xorg.fontbh100dpi
      ];
    }
    
  • services.prometheus.alertManagerTimeout has been removed as it has been deprecated upstream and has no effect.

  • The DHCP server (services.dhcpd4, services.dhcpd6) has been hardened. The service is now using the systemd’s DynamicUser mechanism to run as an unprivileged dynamically-allocated user with limited capabilities. The dhcpd state files are now always stored in /var/lib/dhcpd{4,6} and the services.dhcpd4.stateDir and service.dhcpd6.stateDir options have been removed. If you were depending on root privileges or set{uid,gid,cap} binaries in dhcpd shell hooks, you may give dhcpd more capabilities with e.g. systemd.services.dhcpd6.serviceConfig.AmbientCapabilities.

  • The mailpile email webclient (services.mailpile) has been removed due to its reliance on python2.

  • services.ipfs.extraFlags is now escaped with utils.escapeSystemdExecArgs. If you rely on systemd interpolating extraFlags in the service ExecStart, this will no longer work.

  • hbase version 0.98.24 has been removed. The package now defaults to version 2.4.11. Versions 1.7.1 and 3.0.0-alpha-2 are also available.

  • services.paperless-ng was renamed to services.paperless. Accordingly, the paperless-ng-manage script (located in dataDir) was renamed to paperless-manage. services.paperless now uses paperless-ngx.

  • The matrix-synapse service (services.matrix-synapse) has been converted to use the settings option defined in RFC42. This means that options that are part of your homeserver.yaml configuration, and that were specified at the top-level of the module (services.matrix-synapse) now need to be moved into services.matrix-synapse.settings. And while not all options you may use are defined in there, they are still supported, because you can set arbitrary values in this freeform type.

    The listeners.*.bind_address option was renamed to bind_addresses in order to match the upstream homeserver.yaml option name. It is now also a list of strings instead of a string.

    An example to make the required migration clearer:

    Before:

    {
      services.matrix-synapse = {
        enable = true;
    
        server_name = "example.com";
        public_baseurl = "https://example.com:8448";
    
        enable_registration = false;
        registration_shared_secret = "xohshaeyui8jic7uutuDogahkee3aehuaf6ei3Xouz4iicie5thie6nohNahceut";
        macaroon_secret_key = "xoo8eder9seivukaiPh1cheikohquuw8Yooreid0The4aifahth3Ou0aiShaiz4l";
    
        tls_certificate_path = "/var/lib/acme/example.com/fullchain.pem";
        tls_certificate_path = "/var/lib/acme/example.com/fullchain.pem";
    
        listeners = [ {
          port = 8448;
          bind_address = "";
          type = "http";
          tls = true;
          resources = [ {
            names = [ "client" ];
            compress = true;
          } {
            names = [ "federation" ];
            compress = false;
          } ];
        } ];
    
      };
    }
    

    After:

    {
      services.matrix-synapse = {
        enable = true;
    
        # this attribute set holds all values that go into your homeserver.yaml configuration
        # See https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/sample_config.yaml for
        # possible values.
        settings = {
          server_name = "example.com";
          public_baseurl = "https://example.com:8448";
    
          enable_registration = false;
          # pass `registration_shared_secret` and `macaroon_secret_key` via `extraConfigFiles` instead
    
          tls_certificate_path = "/var/lib/acme/example.com/fullchain.pem";
          tls_certificate_path = "/var/lib/acme/example.com/fullchain.pem";
    
          listeners = [ {
            port = 8448;
            bind_addresses = [
              "::"
              "0.0.0.0"
            ];
            type = "http";
            tls = true;
            resources = [ {
              names = [ "client" ];
              compress = true;
            } {
              names = [ "federation" ];
              compress = false;
            } ];
          } ];
        };
    
        extraConfigFiles = [
          "/run/keys/matrix-synapse/secrets.yaml"
        ];
      };
    }
    

    The secrets in your original config should be migrated into a YAML file that is included via extraConfigFiles. The filename must be quoted to prevent nix from copying it to the (world readable) store.

    Additionally a few option defaults have been synced up with upstream default values, for example the max_upload_size grew from 10M to 50M. For the same reason, the default media_store_path was changed from ${dataDir}/media to ${dataDir}/media_store if system.stateVersion is at least 22.05. Files will need to be manually moved to the new location if the stateVersion is updated.

    As of Synapse 1.58.0, the old groups/communities feature has been disabled by default. It will be completely removed with Synapse 1.61.0.

  • The Keycloak package (pkgs.keycloak) has been switched from the Wildfly version, which will soon be deprecated, to the Quarkus based version. The Keycloak service (services.keycloak) has been updated to accommodate the change and now differs from the previous version in a few ways:

    For example, when using a reverse proxy the migration could look like this:

    Before:

      services.keycloak = {
        enable = true;
        httpPort = "8080";
        frontendUrl = "https://keycloak.example.com/auth";
        database.passwordFile = "/run/keys/db_password";
        extraConfig = {
          "subsystem=undertow"."server=default-server"."http-listener=default".proxy-address-forwarding = true;
        };
      };
    

    After:

      services.keycloak = {
        enable = true;
        settings = {
          http-port = 8080;
          hostname = "keycloak.example.com";
          http-relative-path = "/auth";
          proxy = "edge";
        };
        database.passwordFile = "/run/keys/db_password";
      };
    
  • The MoinMoin wiki engine (services.moinmoin) has been removed, because Python 2 is being retired from nixpkgs.

  • Services in the hadoop module previously set openFirewall to true by default. This has now been changed to false. Node definitions for multi-node clusters would need openFirewall = true; to be added to to hadoop services when upgrading from NixOS 21.11.

  • services.hadoop.yarn.nodemanager now uses cgroup-based CPU limit enforcement by default. Additionally, the option useCGroups was added to nodemanagers as an easy way to switch back to the old behavior.

  • The wafHook hook now honors NIX_BUILD_CORES when enableParallelBuilding is not set explicitly. Packages can restore the old behaviour by setting enableParallelBuilding=false.

  • pkgs.claws-mail-gtk2, representing Claws Mail’s older release version three, was removed in order to get rid of Python 2. Please switch to claws-mail, which is Claws Mail’s latest release based on GTK+3 and Python 3.

  • The writers.writePython2 and corresponding writers.writePython2Bin convenience functions to create executable Python 2 scripts in the store were removed in preparation of removal of the Python 2 interpreter. Scripts have to be converted to Python 3 for use with writers.writePython3 or writers.writePyPy2 needs to be used.

  • buildGoModule was updated to use go_1_17, third party derivations that specify >= go 1.17 in the main go.mod will need to regenerate their vendorSha256 hash.

  • The gnome-passwordsafe package updated to version 6.x and renamed to gnome-secrets.

  • services.gnome.experimental-features.realtime-scheduling option has been removed, as GNOME Shell now uses rtkit. Use security.rtkit.enable = true; instead. As before, you will need to have it enabled using GSettings.

  • services.telepathy will no longer be enabled by default for GNOME desktops, one should enable it in their configs if using Empathy or Polari.

  • If you previously used /etc/docker/daemon.json, you need to incorporate the changes into the new option virtualisation.docker.daemon.settings.

  • Ntopng (services.ntopng) is updated to 5.2.1 and uses a separate Redis instance if system.stateVersion is at least 22.05. Existing setups shouldn’t be affected.

  • The backward compatibility in services.wordpress to configure sites with the old interface has been removed. Please use services.wordpress.sites instead.

  • The backward compatibility in services.dokuwiki to configure sites with the old interface has been removed. Please use services.dokuwiki.sites instead.

  • opensmtpd-extras is no longer build with python2 scripting support due to python2 deprecation in nixpkgs

  • services.miniflux.adminCredentialFiles is now required, instead of defaulting to admin and password.

  • The taskserver module no longer implicitly opens ports in the firewall configuration. This is now controlled through the option services.taskserver.openFirewall.

  • The autorestic package has been upgraded from 1.3.0 to 1.5.0 which introduces breaking changes in config file, check their migration guide for more details.

  • teleport has been upgraded to major version 9. Please see upstream upgrade instructions and release notes.

  • For pkgs.python3.pkgs.ipython, its direct dependency pkgs.python3.pkgs.matplotlib-inline (which is really an adapter to integrate matplotlib in ipython if it is installed) does not depend on pkgs.python3.pkgs.matplotlib anymore. This is closer to a non-Nix install of ipython. This has the added benefit to reduce the closure size of ipython from ~400MB to ~160MB (including ~100MB for python itself).

  • documentation.man has been refactored to support choosing a man implementation other than GNU’s man-db. For this, documentation.man.manualPages has been renamed to documentation.man.man-db.manualPages. If you want to use the new alternative man implementation mandoc, add documentation.man = { enable = true; man-db.enable = false; mandoc.enable = true; } to your configuration.

  • Normal users (with isNormalUser = true) which have non-empty subUidRanges or subGidRanges set no longer have additional implicit ranges allocated. To enable automatic allocation back set autoSubUidGidRange = true.

  • idris2 now requires --package when using packages contrib and network, while previously these idris2 packages were automatically loaded.

  • The iputils package, which is installed by default, no longer provides the legacy tools tftpd and traceroute6. More tools (ninfod, rarpd, and rdisc) are going to be removed in the next release. See upstream’s release notes for more details and available replacements.

  • services.thelounge.private was removed in favor of services.thelounge.public, to follow with upstream changes.

  • pkgs.docbookrx was removed since it’s unmaintained

  • pkgs._7zz is now correctly licensed as LGPL3+ and BSD3 with optional unfree unRAR licensed code

  • The vim.customize function produced by vimUtils.makeCustomizable now has a slightly different interface:

    • The wrapper now includes everything in the given Vim derivation if name is "vim" (the default). This makes the wrapManual argument obsolete, but this behavior can be overridden by setting the standalone argument.

    • All the executables present in the given derivation (or, in standalone mode, only the *vim ones) are wrapped. This makes the wrapGui argument obsolete.

    • The vimExecutableName and gvimExecutableName arguments were replaced by a single executableName argument in which the shell variable $exe can be used to refer to the wrapped executable’s name.

    See the comments in pkgs/applications/editors/vim/plugins/vim-utils.nix for more details.

    vimUtils.vimWithRC was removed. You should instead use customize on a Vim derivation, which now accepts vimrcFile and gvimrcFile arguments.

  • tilp2 was removed together with its module

  • The F-PROT antivirus (fprot package) and its service module were removed because it reached end-of-life.

  • bird1 and its modules services.bird as well as services.bird6 have been removed. Upgrade to services.bird2.

  • The options networking.interfaces.<name>.ipv4.routes and networking.interfaces.<name>.ipv6.routes are no longer ignored when using networkd instead of the default scripted network backend by setting networking.useNetworkd to true.

  • The miller package has been upgraded from 5.10.3 to 6.2.0. See What’s new in Miller 6.

  • MultiMC has been replaced with the fork PrismLauncher due to upstream developers being hostile to 3rd party package maintainers. PrismLauncher removes all MultiMC branding and is aimed at providing proper 3rd party packages like the one contained in Nixpkgs. This change affects the data folder where game instances and other save and configuration files are stored. Users with existing installations should rename ~/.local/share/multimc to ~/.local/share/PrismLauncher. The main config file’s path has also moved from ~/.local/share/multimc/multimc.cfg to ~/.local/share/PrismLauncher/prismlauncher.cfg.

  • systemd-nspawn@.service settings have been reverted to the default systemd behaviour. User namespaces are now activated by default. If you want to keep running nspawn containers without user namespaces you need to set systemd.nspawn.<name>.execConfig.PrivateUsers = false

  • systemd-shutdown is now properly linked on shutdown to unmount all filesystems and device mapper devices cleanly. This can be disabled using systemd.shutdownRamfs.enable.

  • The Tor SOCKS proxy is now actually disabled if services.tor.client.enable is set to false (the default). If you are using this functionality but didn’t change the setting or set it to false, you now need to set it to true.

  • services.github-runner has been hardened. Notably address families and system calls have been restricted, which may adversely affect some kinds of testing, e.g. using AF_BLUETOOTH to test bluetooth devices.

  • The terraform 0.12 compatibility has been removed and the terraform.withPlugins and terraform-providers.mkProvider implementations simplified. Providers now need to be stored under $out/libexec/terraform-providers/<registry>/<owner>/<name>/<version>/<os>_<arch>/terraform-provider-<name>_v<version> (which mkProvider does).

    This breaks back-compat so it’s not possible to mix-and-match with previous versions of nixpkgs. In exchange, it now becomes possible to use the providers from nixpkgs-terraform-providers-bin directly.

  • The dendrite package has been upgraded from 0.5.1 to 0.6.5. Instances configured with split sqlite databases, which has been the default in NixOS, require merging of the federation sender and signing key databases. See upstream release notes on version 0.6.0 for details on database changes.

  • The existing pkgs.opentelemetry-collector has been moved to pkgs.opentelemetry-collector-contrib to match the actual source being the “contrib” edition. pkgs.opentelemetry-collector is now the actual core release of opentelemetry-collector. If you use the community contributions you should change the package you refer to. If you don’t need them update your commands from otelcontribcol to otelcorecol and enjoy a 7x smaller binary.

  • services.zookeeper has a new option jre for specifying the JRE to start zookeeper with. It defaults to the JRE that pkgs.zookeeper was wrapped with, instead of pkgs.jre. This changes the JRE to pkgs.jdk11_headless by default.

  • pkgs.pgadmin now refers to pkgs.pgadmin4. pgadmin3 has been removed.

  • pkgs.minetestclient_4 and pkgs.minetestserver_4 have been removed, as the last 4.x release was in 2018. pkgs.minetestclient (equivalent to pkgs.minetest ) and pkgs.minetestserver can be used instead.

  • pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk is now deprecated in favor of pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk-sans and pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk-serif because they each have different release schedules. To maintain compatibility with prior releases of Nixpkgs, pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk is currently an alias of pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk-sans and doesn’t include serif fonts.

  • pkgs.epgstation has been upgraded from v1 to v2, resulting in incompatible changes in the database scheme and configuration format.

  • Some top-level settings under services.epgstation is now deprecated because it was redundant due to the same options being present in services.epgstation.settings.

  • The option services.epgstation.basicAuth was removed because basic authentication support was dropped by upstream.

  • The option services.epgstation.database.passwordFile no longer has a default value. Make sure to set this option explicitly before upgrading. Change the database password if necessary.

  • The services.epgstation.settings option now expects options for config.yml in EPGStation v2.

  • Existing data for the services.epgstation module would have to be backed up prior to the upgrade. To back up existing data to /tmp/epgstation.bak, run sudo -u epgstation epgstation run backup /tmp/epgstation.bak. To import that data after to the upgrade, run sudo -u epgstation epgstation run v1migrate /tmp/epgstation.bak

  • switch-to-configuration (the script that is run when running nixos-rebuild switch for example) has been reworked

    • The interface that allows activation scripts to restart units has been streamlined. Restarting and reloading is now done by a single file /run/nixos/activation-restart-list that honors restartIfChanged and reloadIfChanged of the units.

      • Preferring to reload instead of restarting can still be achieved using /run/nixos/activation-reload-list.

    • The script now uses a proper ini-file parser to parse systemd units. Some values are now only searched in one section instead of in the entire unit. This is only relevant for units that don’t use the NixOS systemd moule.

      • RefuseManualStop, X-OnlyManualStart, X-StopOnRemoval, X-StopOnReconfiguration are only searched in the [Unit] section

      • X-ReloadIfChanged, X-RestartIfChanged, X-StopIfChanged are only searched in the [Service] section

  • The services.bookstack.cacheDir option has been removed, since the cache directory is now handled by systemd.

  • The services.bookstack.extraConfig option has been replaced by services.bookstack.config which implements a settings-style configuration.

  • lib.assertMsg and lib.assertOneOf no longer return false if the passed condition is false, throwing the given error message instead (which makes the resulting error message less cluttered). This will not impact the behaviour of code using these functions as intended, namely as top-level wrapper for assert conditions.

  • The vpnc package has been changed to use GnuTLS instead of OpenSSL by default for licensing reasons.

  • The default version of nextcloud is nextcloud24. Please note that it’s not possible to upgrade nextcloud across multiple major versions! This means it’s e.g. not possible to upgrade from nextcloud22 to nextcloud24 in a single deploy and most 21.11 users will have to upgrade to nextcloud23 first.

  • pkgs.vimPlugins.onedark-nvim now refers to navarasu/onedark.nvim (formerly refers to olimorris/onedarkpro.nvim).

  • services.pipewire.enable will default to enabling the WirePlumber session manager instead of pipewire-media-session. pipewire-media-session is deprecated by upstream and not recommended, but can still be manually enabled by setting services.pipewire.media-session.enable to true and services.pipewire.wireplumber.enable to false.

  • pkgs.makeDesktopItem has been refactored to provide a more idiomatic API. Specifically:

    • All valid options as of FDO Desktop Entry specification version 1.4 can now be passed in as explicit arguments

    • exec can now be null, for entries that are not of type Application

    • mimeType argument is renamed to mimeTypes for consistency

    • mimeTypes, categories, implements, keywords, onlyShowIn and notShowIn take lists of strings instead of one string with semicolon separators

    • extraDesktopEntries renamed to extraConfig for consistency

    • Actions should now be provided as an attrset actions, the Actions line will be autogenerated.

    • extraEntries is removed.

    • Additional validation is added both at eval time and at build time.

    See the vscode package for a more detailed example.

  • Existing resholve* functions have been renamed and nested under pkgs.resholve. Update uses to:

    • resholvePackage -> resholve.mkDerivation

    • resholveScript -> resholve.writeScript

    • resholveScriptBin -> resholve.writeScriptBin

  • pkgs.cosmopolitan no longer provides the cosmoc command. It has been moved to pkgs.cosmoc.

  • pkgs.graalvmXX-ce packages no longer provide support for Python/Ruby/WASM, instead focusing only in Java and Native Image Support. If you need to add support back, please see the pkgs.graalvmCEPackages.mkGraal function to create your own customized version of GraalVM with support for what you need.

Other Notable Changes

  • The option services.redis.servers was added to support per-application redis-server which is more secure since Redis databases are only mere key prefixes without any configuration or ACL of their own. Backward-compatibility is preserved by mapping old services.redis.settings to services.redis.servers."".settings, but you are strongly encouraged to name each redis-server instance after the application using it, instead of keeping that nameless one. Except for the nameless services.redis.servers."" still accessible at 127.0.0.1:6379, and to the members of the Unix group redis through the Unix socket /run/redis/redis.sock, all other services.redis.servers.${serverName} are only accessible by default to the members of the Unix group redis-${serverName} through the Unix socket /run/redis-${serverName}/redis.sock.

  • The option virtualisation.vmVariant was added to allow users to make changes to the nixos-rebuild build-vm configuration that do not apply to their normal system.

    The config.system.build.vm attribute now always exists and defaults to the value from vmVariant. Configurations that import the virtualisation/qemu-vm.nix module themselves will override this value, such that vmVariant is not used.

    Similarly virtualisation.vmVariantWithBootloader was added.

  • The configuration portion of the nix-daemon module has been reworked and exposed as nix.settings:

  • kops defaults to 1.23.2, which will enable Instance Metadata Service Version 2 and require tokens on new clusters with Kubernetes >= 1.22. This will increase security by default, but may break some types of workloads. The default behaviour for spec.kubeDNS.nodeLocalDNS.forwardToKubeDNS has changed from true to false. Cilium now has disable-cnp-status-updates: true by default. Set this to false if you rely on the CiliumNetworkPolicy status fields. Support for Kubernetes 1.17, the Lyft CNI, Weave CNI on Kubernetes >= 1.23, CentOS 7 and 8, Debian 9, RHEL 7, and Ubuntu 16.05 (Xenial) has been removed. See the 1.22 release notes and 1.23 release notes for more details, including other significant changes.

  • Mattermost has been upgraded to extended support version 6.3 as the previously packaged extended support version 5.37 is reaching end of life. Migration may take some time, see the changelog and important upgrade notes.

  • The writers.writePyPy2/writers.writePyPy3 and corresponding writers.writePyPy2Bin/writers.writePyPy3Bin convenience functions to create executable Python 2/3 scripts using the PyPy interpreter were added.

  • Some improvements have been made to the hadoop module:

    • A gatewayRole option has been added, for deploying hadoop cluster configuration files to a node that does not have any active services

    • Support for older versions of hadoop have been added to the module

    • Overriding and extending site XML files has been made easier

  • The auto-upgrade service now accepts persistent (default: true) parameter. By default auto-upgrade will now run immediately if it would have been triggered at least once during the time when the timer was inactive.

  • Mastodon now uses services.redis.servers to start a new redis server, instead of using a global redis server. This improves compatibility with other services that use redis.

    Note that this will recreate the redis database, although according to the Mastodon docs, this is almost harmless:

    Losing the Redis database is almost harmless: The only irrecoverable data will be the contents of the Sidekiq queues and scheduled retries of previously failed jobs. The home and list feeds are stored in Redis, but can be regenerated with tootctl.

    If you do want to save the redis database, you can use the following commands:

    redis-cli save
    cp /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb "/var/lib/redis-mastodon/dump.rdb"
    
  • Peertube now uses services.redis.servers to start a new redis server, instead of using a global redis server. This improves compatibility with other services that use redis.

    Redis database is used for storage only cache and job queue. More information can be found here - Peertube architecture.

    If you do want to save the redis database, you can use the following commands before upgrade OS:

    redis-cli save
    sudo mkdir /var/lib/redis-peertube
    sudo cp /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb /var/lib/redis-peertube/dump.rdb
    
  • Added the keter NixOS module. Keter reverse proxies requests to your loaded application based on virtual hostnames.

  • If you are using Wayland you can choose to use the Ozone Wayland support in Chrome and several Electron apps by setting the environment variable NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1 (for example via environment.sessionVariables.NIXOS_OZONE_WL = "1"). This is not enabled by default because Ozone Wayland is still under heavy development and behavior is not always flawless. Furthermore, not all Electron apps use the latest Electron versions.

  • A new option group systemd.network.wait-online was added, with options to configure systemd-networkd-wait-online.service:

    • anyInterface allows specifying that the network should be considered online when at least one interface is online (useful on laptops)

    • timeout defines how long to wait for the network to come online

    • extraArgs for everything else

  • The influxdb2 package was split into influxdb2-server and influxdb2-cli, matching the split that took place upstream. A combined influxdb2 package is still provided in this release for backwards compatibility, but will be removed at a later date.

  • The unifi package was switched from unifi6 to unifi7. Direct downgrades from Unifi 7 to Unifi 6 are not possible and require restoring from a backup made by Unifi 6.

  • programs.zsh.autosuggestions.strategy now takes a list of strings instead of a string.

  • The asterisk and asterisk-stable packages were switched from asterisk_18 to the newly-packaged asterisk_19. Asterisk 13 and 17 have been removed as they have reached their end of life.

  • The services.unifi.openPorts option default value of true is now deprecated and will be changed to false in 22.11. Configurations using this default will print a warning when rebuilt.

  • The services.unifi-video.openPorts option default value of true is now deprecated and will be changed to false in 22.11. Configurations using this default will print a warning when rebuilt.

  • security.acme certificates will now correctly check for CA revokation before reaching their minimum age.

  • Removing domains from security.acme.certs._name_.extraDomainNames will now correctly remove those domains during rebuild/renew.

  • MariaDB is now offered in several versions, not just the newest one. So if you have a need for running MariaDB 10.4 for example, you can now just set services.mysql.package = pkgs.mariadb_104;. In general, it is recommended to run the newest version, to get the newest features, while sticking with an LTS version will most likely provide a more stable experience. Sometimes software is also incompatible with the newest version of MariaDB.

  • The option programs.ssh.enableAskPassword was added, decoupling the setting of SSH_ASKPASS from services.xserver.enable. This allows easy usage in non-X11 environments, e.g. Wayland.

  • programs.ssh.knownHosts has gained an extraHostNames option to augment hostNames. It is now possible to use the attribute name of a knownHosts entry as the primary host name and specify secondary host names using extraHostNames without having to duplicate the primary host name.

  • The services.stubby module was converted to a settings-style configuration.

  • The option services.xserver.desktopManager.runXdgAutostartIfNone was added in order to automatically run XDG autostart files for sessions without a desktop manager. This replaces helpers like the dex package.

  • When setting i18n.inputMethod.enabled to fcitx5, it no longer creates corresponding systemd user services. It now relies on XDG autostart files to start and work properly in your desktop sessions. If you are using only a window manager without a desktop manager, you need to enable services.xserver.desktopManager.runXdgAutostartIfNone or using the dex package to make fcitx5 work.

  • The option services.duplicati.dataDir has been added to allow changing the location of duplicati’s files.

  • The options boot.extraModprobeConfig and boot.blacklistedKernelModules now also take effect in the initrd by copying the file /etc/modprobe.d/nixos.conf into the initrd.

  • nixos-generate-config now puts the dhcp configuration in hardware-configuration.nix instead of configuration.nix.

  • ORY Kratos was updated to version 0.9.0-alpha.3, which introduces some breaking changes:

    • All endpoints at the Admin API are now exposed at /admin/. For example, endpoint https://kratos:4434/identities is now exposed at https://kratos:4434/admin/identities

    • Configuration key selfservice.whitelisted_return_urls has been renamed to allowed_return_urls

    • The password_identifier form field of the password login strategy has been renamed to identifier to make compatibility with passwordless flows possible.

    • Instead of having a global default_schema_url which developers used to update their schema, you now need to define the default_schema_id which must reference schema ID in your config.

    • Calling /self-service/recovery without flow ID or with an invalid flow ID while authenticated will now respond with an error instead of redirecting to the default page.

    • If you are relying on the SQLite images, update your Docker Pull commands as follows:

      • docker pull oryd/kratos:{version}

    • Additionally, all passwords now have to be at least 8 characters long.

    • For more details, see:

  • fetchFromSourcehut now allows fetching repositories recursively using fetchgit or fetchhg if the argument fetchSubmodules is set to true.

  • A module for declarative configuration of openconnect VPN profiles was added under networking.openconnect.

  • The element-desktop package now has an useKeytar option (defaults to true), which allows disabling keytar and in turn libsecret usage (which binds to native credential managers / keychain libraries).

  • The option services.thelounge.plugins has been added to allow installing plugins for The Lounge. Plugins can be found in pkgs.theLoungePlugins.plugins and pkgs.theLoungePlugins.themes.

  • The option services.xserver.videoDriver = [ "nvidia" ]; will now also install nvidia VA-API drivers by default.

  • The firmwareLinuxNonfree package has been renamed to linux-firmware.

  • It is now possible to specify wordlists to include as handy to access environment variables using the config.environment.wordlist configuration options.

  • The services.mbpfan module was converted to a RFC 0042 configuration.

  • The default value for programs.spacefm.settings.graphical_su got unset. It previously pointed to gksu which has been removed.

  • The Dino XMPP client was updated to 0.3, adding support for audio and video calls.

  • services.mattermost.plugins has been added to allow the declarative installation of Mattermost plugins. Plugins are automatically repackaged using autoPatchelf.

  • services.logrotate.enable now defaults to true if any rotate path has been defined, and some paths have been added by default.

  • The logrotate module also has been updated to freeform syntax: services.logrotate.paths and services.logrotate.extraConfig will work, but issue deprecation warnings and services.logrotate.settings should now be used instead.

  • security.pam.ussh has been added, which allows authorizing PAM sessions based on SSH certificates held within an SSH agent, using pam-ussh.

  • The vscode-extensions.ionide.ionide-fsharp package has been updated to 6.0.0 and now requires .NET 6.0.

  • The phpPackages.box package has been updated from 2.7.5 to 3.16.0. See the upgrade guide for more details.

  • The zrepl package has been updated from 0.4.0 to 0.5:

    • The RPC protocol version was bumped; all zrepl daemons in a setup must be updated and restarted before replication can resume.

    • A bug involving encrypt-on-receive has been fixed. Read the zrepl documentation and check the output of zfs get -r encryption,zrepl:placeholder PATH_TO_ROOTFS on the receiver.

  • The polybar package has been updated from 3.5.7 to 3.6.2. See the changelog for more details.

    • Breaking changes include changes to escaping rules in configuration values, changes in behavior when encountering invalid tag names, and changes to inter-process-messaging (IPC).

  • Renamed option services.openssh.challengeResponseAuthentication to services.openssh.kbdInteractiveAuthentication. Reason is that the old name has been deprecated upstream. Using the old option name will still work, but produce a warning.

  • services.autorandr now allows for adding hooks and profiles declaratively.

  • The pomerium-cli command has been moved out of the pomerium package into the pomerium-cli package, following upstream’s repository split. If you are using the pomerium-cli command, you should now install the pomerium-cli package.

  • The option services.networking.networkmanager.enableFccUnlock was added to support FCC unlock procedures. Since release 1.18.4, the ModemManager daemon no longer automatically performs the FCC unlock procedure by default. See the docs for more details.

  • programs.tmux has a new option plugins that accepts a list of packages from the tmuxPlugins group. The specified packages are added to the system and loaded by tmux.

  • The polkit service, available at security.polkit.enable, is now disabled by default. It will automatically be enabled through services and desktop environments as needed.

  • mercury was updated to 22.01.1, which has some breaking changes (Mercury 22.01 news).

  • xfsprogs was update to version 5.15, which enables inobtcount and bigtime by default on filesystem creation. Support for these features was added in kernel 5.10 and deemed stable in kernel 5.15. If you want to be able to mount XFS filesystems created with this release of xfsprogs on kernel releases older than 5.10, you need to format them with mkfs.xfs -m bigtime=0 -m inobtcount=0.

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce now includes Xfce’s screen locker, xfce4-screensaver that is enabled by default. You can disable it by setting false to services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enableScreensaver.

  • The hadoop package has added support for aarch64-linux and aarch64-darwin as of 3.3.1 (#158613).

  • The R package now builds again on aarch64-darwin (#158992).

  • The nss package was split into nss_esr and nss_latest, with nss being an alias for nss_esr. This was done to ease maintenance of nss and dependent high-profile packages like firefox.

  • The default scribus version is now 1.5, while version 1.4 is still available as scribus_1_4 (#172700).

  • The Nextcloud module now supports to create a Mysql database automatically with services.nextcloud.database.createLocally enabled.

  • The Nextcloud module now allows setting the value of the max-age directive of the Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header, which is now controlled by the services.nextcloud.https option, rather than services.nginx.recommendedHttpHeaders.

  • The spark3 package has been updated from 3.1.2 to 3.2.1 (#160075):

    • Testing has been enabled for aarch64-linux in addition to x86_64-linux.

    • The spark3 package is now usable on aarch64-darwin as a result of #158613 and #158992.

  • The option services.snapserver.openFirewall will no longer default to true starting with NixOS 22.11. Enable it explicitly if you need to control Snapserver remotely or connect streamig clients from other hosts.

  • The option networking.useDHCP isn’t deprecated anymore. When using systemd-networkd, a generic .network-unit is added which enables DHCP for each interface matching en*, eth* or wl* with priority 99 (which means that it doesn’t have any effect if such an interface is matched by a .network-unit with a lower priority). In case of scripted networking, no behavior was changed.

  • The new postgresqlTestHook runs a PostgreSQL server for the duration of package checks.

  • zfs was updated from 2.1.4 to 2.1.5, enabling it to be used with Linux kernel 5.18.

  • stdenv.mkDerivation now supports a self-referencing finalAttrs: parameter containing the final mkDerivation arguments including overrides. drv.overrideAttrs now supports two parameters finalAttrs: previousAttrs:. This allows packaging configuration to be overridden in a consistent manner by providing an alternative to rec {} syntax.

    Additionally, passthru can now reference finalAttrs.finalPackage containing the final package, including attributes such as the output paths and overrideAttrs.

    New language integrations can be simplified by overriding a “prototype” package containing the language-specific logic. This removes the need for a extra layer of overriding for the “generic builder” arguments, thus removing a usability problem and source of error.

Release 21.11 (“Porcupine”, 2021/11/30)

  • Support is planned until the end of June 2022, handing over to 22.05.

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Nix has been updated to version 2.4, reference its release notes for more information on what has changed. The previous version of Nix, 2.3.16, remains available for the time being in the nix_2_3 package.

  • iptables is now using nf_tables under the hood, by using iptables-nft, similar to Debian and Fedora. This means, ip[6]tables, arptables and ebtables commands will actually show rules from some specific tables in the nf_tables kernel subsystem. In case you’re migrating from an older release without rebooting, there might be cases where you end up with iptable rules configured both in the legacy iptables kernel backend, as well as in the nf_tables backend. This can lead to confusing firewall behaviour. An iptables-save after switching will complain about “iptables-legacy tables present”. It’s probably best to reboot after the upgrade, or manually removing all legacy iptables rules (via the iptables-legacy package).

  • systemd got an nftables backend, and configures (networkd) rules in their own io.systemd.* tables. Check nft list ruleset to see these rules, not iptables-save (which only shows iptables-created rules.

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 8.0, updated from 7.4.

  • kops now defaults to 1.21.1, which uses containerd as the default runtime.

  • python3 now defaults to Python 3.9, updated from Python 3.8.

  • PostgreSQL now defaults to major version 13.

  • spark now defaults to spark 3, updated from 2. A migration guide is available.

  • Improvements have been made to the Hadoop module and package:

    • HDFS and YARN now support production-ready highly available deployments with automatic failover.

    • Hadoop now defaults to Hadoop 3, updated from 2.

    • JournalNode, ZKFS and HTTPFS services have been added.

  • Activation scripts can now, optionally, be run during a nixos-rebuild dry-activate and can detect the dry activation by reading $NIXOS_ACTION. This allows activation scripts to output what they would change if the activation was really run. The users/modules activation script supports this and outputs some of is actions.

  • KDE Plasma now finally works on Wayland.

  • bash now defaults to major version 5.

  • Systemd was updated to version 249 (from 247).

  • Pantheon desktop has been updated to version 6. Due to changes of screen locker, if locking doesn’t work for you, please try gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-lock-screen false.

  • kubernetes-helm now defaults to 3.7.0, which introduced some breaking changes to the experimental OCI manifest format. See HIP 6 for more details. helmfile also defaults to 0.141.0, which is the minimum compatible version.

  • GNOME has been upgraded to 41. Please take a look at their Release Notes for details.

  • LXD support was greatly improved:

    • building LXD images from configurations is now directly possible with just nixpkgs

    • hydra is now building nixOS LXD images that can be used standalone with full nixos-rebuild support

  • OpenSSH was updated to version 8.8p1

    • This breaks connections to old SSH daemons as ssh-rsa host keys and ssh-rsa public keys that were signed with SHA-1 are disabled by default now

    • These can be re-enabled, see the OpenSSH changelog for details

  • ORY Kratos was updated to version 0.8.0-alpha.3

    • This release requires you to run SQL migrations. Please, as always, create a backup of your database first!

    • The SDKs are now generated with tag v0alpha2 to reflect that some signatures have changed in a breaking fashion. Please update your imports from v0alpha1 to v0alpha2.

    • The SMTPS scheme used in courier config URL with cleartext/StartTLS/TLS SMTP connection types is now only supporting implicit TLS. For StartTLS and cleartext SMTP, please use the SMTP scheme instead.

    • for more details, see Release Notes.

New Services

Backward Incompatibilities

  • The NixOS VM test framework, pkgs.nixosTest/make-test-python.nix (pkgs.testers.nixosTest since 22.05), now requires detaching commands such as succeed("foo &") and succeed("foo | xclip -i") to close stdout. This can be done with a redirect such as succeed("foo >&2 &"). This breaking change was necessitated by a race condition causing tests to fail or hang. It applies to all methods that invoke commands on the nodes, including execute, succeed, fail, wait_until_succeeds, wait_until_fails.

  • The services.wakeonlan option was removed, and replaced with networking.interfaces.<name>.wakeOnLan.

  • The security.wrappers option now requires to always specify an owner, group and whether the setuid/setgid bit should be set. This is motivated by the fact that before NixOS 21.11, specifying either setuid or setgid but not owner/group resulted in wrappers owned by nobody/nogroup, which is unsafe.

  • Since iptables now uses nf_tables backend and ipset doesn’t support it, some applications (ferm, shorewall, firehol) may have limited functionality.

  • The paperless module and package have been removed. All users should migrate to the successor paperless-ng instead. The Paperless project has been archived and advises all users to use paperless-ng instead.

    Users can use the services.paperless-ng module as a replacement while noting the following incompatibilities:

    {
      services.paperless-ng.extraConfig = {
        # Provide languages as ISO 639-2 codes
        # separated by a plus (+) sign.
        # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes
        PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE = "deu+eng+jpn"; # German & English & Japanse
      };
    }
    
    • If you previously specified PAPERLESS_CONSUME_MAIL_* settings in services.paperless.extraConfig you should remove those options now. You now must define those settings in the admin interface of paperless-ng.

    • Option services.paperless.manage no longer exists. Use the script at ${services.paperless-ng.dataDir}/paperless-ng-manage instead. Note that this script only exists after the paperless-ng service has been started at least once.

    • After switching to the new system configuration you should run the Django management command to reindex your documents and optionally create a user, if you don’t have one already.

      To do so, enter the data directory (the value of services.paperless-ng.dataDir, /var/lib/paperless by default), switch to the paperless user and execute the management command like below:

      $ cd /var/lib/paperless
      $ su paperless -s /bin/sh
      $ ./paperless-ng-manage document_index reindex
      # if not already done create a user account, paperless-ng requires a login
      $ ./paperless-ng-manage createsuperuser
      Username (leave blank to use 'paperless'): my-user-name
      Email address: me@example.com
      Password: **********
      Password (again): **********
      Superuser created successfully.
      
  • The staticjinja package has been upgraded from 1.0.4 to 4.1.1

  • Firefox v91 does not support addons with invalid signature anymore. Firefox ESR needs to be used for nix addon support.

  • The erigon ethereum node has moved to a new database format in 2021-05-04, and requires a full resync

  • The erigon ethereum node has moved its database location in 2021-08-03, users upgrading must manually move their chaindata (see release notes).

  • users.users.<name>.group no longer defaults to nogroup, which was insecure. Out-of-tree modules are likely to require adaptation: instead of

    {
      users.users.foo = {
        isSystemUser = true;
      };
    }
    

    also create a group for your user:

    {
      users.users.foo = {
        isSystemUser = true;
        group = "foo";
      };
      users.groups.foo = {};
    }
    
  • services.geoip-updater was broken and has been replaced by services.geoipupdate.

  • ihatemoney has been updated to version 5.1.1 (release notes). If you serve ihatemoney by HTTP rather than HTTPS, you must set services.ihatemoney.secureCookie to false.

  • PHP 7.3 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 21.11 release.

  • Those making use of buildBazelPackage will need to regenerate the fetch hashes (preferred), or set fetchConfigured = false;.

  • consul was upgraded to a new major release with breaking changes, see upstream changelog.

  • fsharp41 has been removed in preference to use the latest dotnet-sdk

  • The following F#-related packages have been removed for being unmaintaned. Please use fetchNuGet for specific packages.

    • ExtCore

    • Fake

    • Fantomas

    • FsCheck

    • FsCheck262

    • FsCheckNunit

    • FSharpAutoComplete

    • FSharpCompilerCodeDom

    • FSharpCompilerService

    • FSharpCompilerTools

    • FSharpCore302

    • FSharpCore3125

    • FSharpCore4001

    • FSharpCore4117

    • FSharpData

    • FSharpData225

    • FSharpDataSQLProvider

    • FSharpFormatting

    • FsLexYacc

    • FsLexYacc706

    • FsLexYaccRuntime

    • FsPickler

    • FsUnit

    • Projekt

    • Suave

    • UnionArgParser

    • ExcelDnaRegistration

    • MathNetNumerics

  • programs.x2goserver is now services.x2goserver

  • The following dotnet-related packages have been removed for being unmaintaned. Please use fetchNuGet for specific packages.

    • Autofac

    • SystemValueTuple

    • MicrosoftDiaSymReader

    • MicrosoftDiaSymReaderPortablePdb

    • SystemCollectionsImmutable

    • SystemCollectionsImmutable131

    • SystemReflectionMetadata

    • NUnit350

    • Deedle

    • ExcelDna

    • GitVersionTree

    • NDeskOptions

  • The antlr package now defaults to the 4.x release instead of the old 2.7.7 version.

  • The pulseeffects package updated to version 4.x and renamed to easyeffects.

  • The libwnck package now defaults to the 3.x release instead of the old 2.31.0 version.

  • The bitwarden_rs packages and modules were renamed to vaultwarden following upstream. More specifically,

    • pkgs.bitwarden_rs, pkgs.bitwarden_rs-sqlite, pkgs.bitwarden_rs-mysql and pkgs.bitwarden_rs-postgresql were renamed to pkgs.vaultwarden, pkgs.vaultwarden-sqlite, pkgs.vaultwarden-mysql and pkgs.vaultwarden-postgresql, respectively.

      • Old names are preserved as aliases for backwards compatibility, but may be removed in the future.

      • The bitwarden_rs executable was also renamed to vaultwarden in all packages.

    • pkgs.bitwarden_rs-vault was renamed to pkgs.vaultwarden-vault.

      • pkgs.bitwarden_rs-vault is preserved as an alias for backwards compatibility, but may be removed in the future.

      • The static files were moved from /usr/share/bitwarden_rs to /usr/share/vaultwarden.

    • The services.bitwarden_rs config module was renamed to services.vaultwarden.

      • services.bitwarden_rs is preserved as an alias for backwards compatibility, but may be removed in the future.

    • systemd.services.bitwarden_rs, systemd.services.backup-bitwarden_rs and systemd.timers.backup-bitwarden_rs were renamed to systemd.services.vaultwarden, systemd.services.backup-vaultwarden and systemd.timers.backup-vaultwarden, respectively.

      • Old names are preserved as aliases for backwards compatibility, but may be removed in the future.

    • users.users.bitwarden_rs and users.groups.bitwarden_rs were renamed to users.users.vaultwarden and users.groups.vaultwarden, respectively.

    • The data directory remains located at /var/lib/bitwarden_rs, for backwards compatibility.

  • yggdrasil was upgraded to a new major release with breaking changes, see upstream changelog.

  • icingaweb2 was upgraded to a new release which requires a manual database upgrade, see upstream changelog.

  • The isabelle package has been upgraded from 2020 to 2021

  • the mingw-64 package has been upgraded from 6.0.0 to 9.0.0

  • tt-rss was upgraded to the commit on 2021-06-21, which has breaking changes. If you use services.tt-rss.extraConfig you should migrate to the putenv-style configuration. See this Discourse post in the tt-rss forums for more details.

  • The following Visual Studio Code extensions were renamed to keep the naming convention uniform.

    • bbenoist.Nix -> bbenoist.nix

    • CoenraadS.bracket-pair-colorizer -> coenraads.bracket-pair-colorizer

    • golang.Go -> golang.go

  • services.uptimed now uses /var/lib/uptimed as its stateDirectory instead of /var/spool/uptimed. Make sure to move all files to the new directory.

  • Deprecated package aliases in emacs.pkgs.* have been removed. These aliases were remnants of the old Emacs package infrastructure. We now use exact upstream names wherever possible.

  • programs.neovim.runtime switched to a linkFarm internally, making it impossible to use wildcards in the source argument.

  • The openrazer and openrazer-daemon packages as well as the hardware.openrazer module now require users to be members of the openrazer group instead of plugdev. With this change, users no longer need be granted the entire set of plugdev group permissions, which can include permissions other than those required by openrazer. This is desirable from a security point of view. The setting hardware.openrazer.users can be used to add users to the openrazer group.

  • The fontconfig service’s dpi option has been removed. Fontconfig should use Xft settings by default so there’s no need to override one value in multiple places. The user can set DPI via ~/.Xresources properly, or at the system level per monitor, or as a last resort at the system level with services.xserver.dpi.

  • The yambar package has been split into yambar and yambar-wayland, corresponding to the xorg and wayland backend respectively. Please switch to yambar-wayland if you are on wayland.

  • The services.minio module gained an additional option consoleAddress, that configures the address and port the web UI is listening, it defaults to :9001. To be able to access the web UI this port needs to be opened in the firewall.

  • The varnish package was upgraded from 6.3.x to 7.x. varnish60 for the last LTS release is also still available.

  • The kubernetes package was upgraded to 1.22. The kubernetes.apiserver.kubeletHttps option was removed and HTTPS is always used.

  • The attribute linuxPackages_latest_hardened was dropped because the hardened patches lag behind the upstream kernel which made version bumps harder. If you want to use a hardened kernel, please pin it explicitly with a versioned attribute such as linuxPackages_5_10_hardened.

  • The nomad package now defaults to a 1.1.x release instead of 1.0.x

  • If exfat is included in boot.supportedFilesystems and when using kernel 5.7 or later, the exfatprogs user-space utilities are used instead of exfat.

  • The todoman package was upgraded from 3.9.0 to 4.0.0. This introduces breaking changes in the configuration file format.

  • The datadog-agent, datadog-integrations-core and datadog-process-agent packages were upgraded from 6.11.2 to 7.30.2, git-2018-09-18 to 7.30.1 and 6.11.1 to 7.30.2, respectively. As a result services.datadog-agent has had breaking changes to the configuration file. For details, see the upstream changelog.

  • opencv2 no longer includes the non-free libraries by default, and consequently pfstools no longer includes OpenCV support by default. Both packages now support an enableUnfree option to re-enable this functionality.

  • services.xserver.displayManager.defaultSession = "plasma5" does not work anymore, instead use either "plasma" for the Plasma X11 session or "plasmawayland" for the Plasma Wayland sesison.

  • boot.kernelParams now only accepts one command line parameter per string. This change is aimed to reduce common mistakes like “param = 12”, which would be parsed as 3 parameters.

  • nix.daemonNiceLevel and nix.daemonIONiceLevel have been removed in favour of the new options nix.daemonCPUSchedPolicy, nix.daemonIOSchedClass and nix.daemonIOSchedPriority. Please refer to the options documentation and the sched(7) and ioprio_set(2) man pages for guidance on how to use them.

  • The coursier package’s binary was renamed from coursier to cs. Completions which haven’t worked for a while should now work with the renamed binary. To keep using coursier, you can create a shell alias.

  • The services.mosquitto module has been rewritten to support multiple listeners and per-listener configuration. Module configurations from previous releases will no longer work and must be updated.

  • The fluidsynth_1 attribute has been removed, as this legacy version is no longer needed in nixpkgs. The actively maintained 2.x series is available as fluidsynth unchanged.

  • Nextcloud 20 (pkgs.nextcloud20) has been dropped because it was EOLed by upstream in 2021-10.

  • The virtualisation.pathsInNixDB option was renamed virtualisation.additionalPaths.

  • The services.ddclient.password option was removed, and replaced with services.ddclient.passwordFile.

  • The default GNAT version has been changed: The gnat attribute now points to gnat12 instead of gnat9.

  • retroArchCores has been removed. This means that using nixpkgs.config.retroarch to customize RetroArch cores is not supported anymore. Instead, use package overrides, for example: retroarch.override { cores = with libretro; [ citra snes9x ]; };. Also, retroarchFull derivation is available for those who want to have all RetroArch cores available.

  • The Linux kernel for security reasons now restricts access to BPF syscalls via BPF_UNPRIV_DEFAULT_OFF=y. Unprivileged access can be reenabled via the kernel.unprivileged_bpf_disabled sysctl knob.

  • /usr will always be included in the initial ramdisk. See the fileSystems.<name>.neededForBoot option. If any files exist under /usr (which is not typical for NixOS), they will be included in the initial ramdisk, increasing its size to a possibly problematic extent.

  • pkgs.haskell-language-server will now by default be linked dynamically to improve TemplateHaskell compatibility. To mitigate the increased closure size it will now by default only support our current default ghc (at the moment 9.0.2). Add other ghc versions via e.g. pkgs.haskell-language-server.override { supportedGhcVersions = [ "90" "92" ]; }.

  • pkgs.redis is now built using the system jemalloc. This disables the experimental active defragmentation feature of redis. Users who require this feature can switch back to redis’ vendored version of jemalloc by setting services.redis.package = pkgs.redis.override { useSystemJemalloc = false; };.

Other Notable Changes

  • The linux kernel package infrastructure was moved out of all-packages.nix, and restructured. Linux related functions and attributes now live under the pkgs.linuxKernel attribute set. In particular the versioned linuxPackages_* package sets (such as linuxPackages_5_4) and kernels from pkgs were moved there and now live under pkgs.linuxKernel.packages.*. The unversioned ones (such as linuxPackages_latest) remain untouched.

  • In NixOS virtual machines (QEMU), the virtualisation module has been updated with new options:

    In addition, the default msize parameter in 9P filesystems (including /nix/store and all shared directories) has been increased to 16K for improved performance.

  • The setting services.openssh.logLevel "VERBOSE" "INFO". This brings NixOS in line with upstream and other Linux distributions, and reduces log spam on servers due to bruteforcing botnets.

    However, if services.fail2ban.enable is true, the fail2ban will override the verbosity to "VERBOSE", so that fail2ban can observe the failed login attempts from the SSH logs.

  • The services.xserver.extraLayouts no longer cause additional rebuilds when a layout is added or modified.

  • Sway: The terminal emulator rxvt-unicode is no longer installed by default via programs.sway.extraPackages. The current default configuration uses alacritty (and soon foot) so this is only an issue when using a customized configuration and not installing rxvt-unicode explicitly.

  • python3 now defaults to Python 3.9. Python 3.9 introduces many deprecation warnings, please look at the What’s New In Python 3.9 post for more information.

  • qtile hase been updated from ‘0.16.0’ to ‘0.18.0’, please check qtile changelog for changes.

  • The claws-mail package now references the new GTK+ 3 release branch, major version 4. To use the GTK+ 2 releases, one can install the claws-mail-gtk2 package.

  • The wordpress module provides a new interface which allows to use different webservers with the new option services.wordpress.webserver. Currently httpd, caddy and nginx are supported. The definitions of wordpress sites should now be set in services.wordpress.sites.

    Sites definitions that use the old interface are automatically migrated in the new option. This backward compatibility will be removed in 22.05.

  • The dokuwiki module provides a new interface which allows to use different webservers with the new option services.dokuwiki.webserver. Currently caddy and nginx are supported. The definitions of dokuwiki sites should now be set in services.dokuwiki.sites.

    Sites definitions that use the old interface are automatically migrated in the new option. This backward compatibility will be removed in 22.05.

  • The order of NSS (host) modules has been brought in line with upstream recommendations:

    • The myhostname module is placed before the resolve (optional) and dns entries, but after file (to allow overriding via /etc/hosts / networking.extraHosts, and prevent ISPs with catchall-DNS resolvers from hijacking .localhost domains)

    • The mymachines module, which provides hostname resolution for local containers (registered with systemd-machined) is placed to the front, to make sure its mappings are preferred over other resolvers.

    • If systemd-networkd is enabled, the resolve module is placed before files and myhostname, as it provides the same logic internally, with caching.

    • The mdns(_minimal) module has been updated to the new priorities.

    If you use your own NSS host modules, make sure to update your priorities according to these rules:

    • NSS modules which should be queried before resolved DNS resolution should use mkBefore.

    • NSS modules which should be queried after resolved, files and myhostname, but before dns should use the default priority

    • NSS modules which should come after dns should use mkAfter.

  • The networking.wireless module (based on wpa_supplicant) has been heavily reworked, solving a number of issues and adding useful features:

    • The automatic discovery of wireless interfaces at boot has been made reliable again (issues #101963, #23196).

    • WPA3 and Fast BSS Transition (802.11r) are now enabled by default for all networks.

    • Secrets like pre-shared keys and passwords can now be handled safely, meaning without including them in a world-readable file (wpa_supplicant.conf under /nix/store). This is achieved by storing the secrets in a secured environmentFile and referring to them though environment variables that are expanded inside the configuration.

    • With multiple interfaces declared, independent wpa_supplicant daemons are started, one for each interface (the services are named wpa_supplicant-wlan0, wpa_supplicant-wlan1, etc.).

    • The generated wpa_supplicant.conf file is now formatted for easier reading.

    • A new scanOnLowSignal option has been added to facilitate fast roaming between access points (enabled by default).

    • A new networks.<name>.authProtocols option has been added to change the authentication protocols used when connecting to a network.

  • The networking.wireless.iwd module has a new networking.wireless.iwd.settings option.

  • The services.smokeping.host option was added and defaulted to localhost. Before, smokeping listened to all interfaces by default. NixOS defaults generally aim to provide non-Internet-exposed defaults for databases and internal monitoring tools, see e.g. #100192. Further, the systemd service for smokeping got reworked defaults for increased operational stability, see PR #144127 for details.

  • The services.syncoid.enable module now properly drops ZFS permissions after usage. Before it delegated permissions to whole pools instead of datasets and didn’t clean up after execution. You can manually look this up for your pools by running zfs allow your-pool-name and use zfs unallow syncoid your-pool-name to clean this up.

  • Zfs: latestCompatibleLinuxPackages is now exported on the zfs package. One can use boot.kernelPackages = config.boot.zfs.package.latestCompatibleLinuxPackages; to always track the latest compatible kernel with a given version of zfs.

  • Nginx will use the value of sslTrustedCertificate if provided for a virtual host, even if enableACME is set. This is useful for providers not using the same certificate to sign OCSP responses and server certificates.

  • lib.formats.yaml’s generate will not generate JSON anymore, but instead use more of the YAML-specific syntax.

  • MariaDB was upgraded from 10.5.x to 10.6.x. Please read the upstream release notes for changes and upgrade instructions.

  • The MariaDB C client library, also known as libmysqlclient or mariadb-connector-c, was upgraded from 3.1.x to 3.2.x. While this should hopefully not have any impact, this upgrade comes with some changes to default behavior, so you might want to review the upstream release notes.

  • GNOME desktop environment now enables QGnomePlatform as the Qt platform theme, which should avoid crashes when opening file chooser dialogs in Qt apps by using XDG desktop portal. Additionally, it will make the apps fit better visually.

  • rofi has been updated from ‘1.6.1’ to ‘1.7.0’, one important thing is the removal of the old xresources based configuration setup. Read more in rofi’s changelog.

  • ipfs now defaults to not listening on you local network. This setting was change as server providers won’t accept port scanning on their private network. If you have several ipfs instances running on a network you own, feel free to change the setting ipfs.localDiscovery = true;. localDiscovery enables different instances to discover each other and share data.

  • lua and luajit interpreters have been patched to avoid looking into /usr/lib directories, thus increasing the purity of the build.

  • Three new options, xdg.mime.addedAssociations, xdg.mime.defaultApplications, and xdg.mime.removedAssociations have been added to the xdg.mime module to allow the configuration of /etc/xdg/mimeapps.list.

  • Kopia was upgraded from 0.8.x to 0.9.x. Please read the upstream release notes for changes and upgrade instructions.

  • The systemd.network module has gained support for the FooOverUDP link type.

  • The networking module has a new networking.fooOverUDP option to configure Foo-over-UDP encapsulations.

  • networking.sits now supports Foo-over-UDP encapsulation.

  • The virtualisation.libvirtd module has been refactored and updated with new options:

  • The cawbird Twitter client now uses its own API keys to count as different application than upstream builds. This is done to evade application-level rate limiting. While existing accounts continue to work, users may want to remove and re-register their account in the client to enjoy a better user experience and benefit from this change.

  • A new option services.prometheus.enableReload has been added which can be enabled to reload the prometheus service when its config file changes instead of restarting.

  • The option services.prometheus.environmentFile has been removed since it was causing issues and Prometheus now has native support for secret files, i.e. basic_auth.password_file and authorization.credentials_file.

  • Dokuwiki now supports caddy! However

    • the nginx option has been removed, in the new configuration, please use the dokuwiki.webserver = "nginx" instead.

    • The “${hostname}” option has been deprecated, please use dokuwiki.sites = [ "${hostname}" ] instead

  • The services.unifi module has been reworked, solving a number of issues. This leads to several user facing changes:

    • The services.unifi.dataDir option is removed and the data is now always located under /var/lib/unifi/data. This is done to make better use of systemd state direcotiry and thus making the service restart more reliable.

    • The unifi logs can now be found under: /var/log/unifi instead of /var/lib/unifi/logs.

    • The unifi run directory can now be found under: /run/unifi instead of /var/lib/unifi/run.

  • security.pam.services.<name>.makeHomeDir now uses umask=0077 instead of umask=0022 when creating the home directory.

  • Loki has had another release. Some default values have been changed for the configuration and some configuration options have been renamed. For more details, please check the upgrade guide.

  • julia now refers to julia-stable instead of julia-lts. In practice this means it has been upgraded from 1.0.4 to 1.5.4.

  • RetroArch has been upgraded from version 1.8.5 to 1.9.13.2. Since the previous release was quite old, if you’re having issues after the upgrade, please delete your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/retroarch/retroarch.cfg file.

  • hydrus has been upgraded from version 438 to 463. Since upgrading between releases this old is advised against, be sure to have a backup of your data before upgrading. For details, see the hydrus manual.

  • More jdk and jre versions are now exposed via java-packages.compiler.

  • The sets haskell.packages and haskell.compiler now contain for every ghc version an attribute with the minor version dropped. E.g. for ghc8107 there also now exists ghc810. Those attributes point to the same compilers and packagesets but have the advantage that e.g. ghc92 stays stable when we update from ghc925 to ghc926.

Release 21.05 (“Okapi”, 2021.05/31)

Support is planned until the end of December 2021, handing over to 21.11.

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Core version changes:

    • gcc: 9.3.0 -> 10.3.0

    • glibc: 2.30 -> 2.32

    • default linux: 5.4 -> 5.10, all supported kernels available

    • mesa: 20.1.7 -> 21.0.1

  • Desktop Environments:

    • GNOME: 3.36 -> 40, see its release notes

    • Plasma5: 5.18.5 -> 5.21.3

    • kdeApplications: 20.08.1 -> 20.12.3

    • cinnamon: 4.6 -> 4.8.1

  • Programming Languages and Frameworks:

    • Python optimizations were disabled again. Builds with optimizations enabled are not reproducible. Optimizations can now be enabled with an option.

  • The linux_latest kernel was updated to the 5.13 series. It currently is not officially supported for use with the zfs filesystem. If you use zfs, you should use a different kernel version (either the LTS kernel, or track a specific one).

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • GNOME desktop environment was upgraded to 40, see the release notes for 40.0 and 3.38. The gnome3 attribute set has been renamed to gnome and so have been the NixOS options.

  • If you are using services.udev.extraRules to assign custom names to network interfaces, this may stop working due to a change in the initialisation of dhcpcd and systemd networkd. To avoid this, either move them to services.udev.initrdRules or see the new Assigning custom names section of the NixOS manual for an example using networkd links.

  • The security.hideProcessInformation module has been removed. It was broken since the switch to cgroups-v2.

  • The linuxPackages.ati_drivers_x11 kernel modules have been removed. The drivers only supported kernels prior to 4.2, and thus have become obsolete.

  • The systemConfig kernel parameter is no longer added to boot loader entries. It has been unused since September 2010, but if do have a system generation from that era, you will now be unable to boot into them.

  • systemd-journal2gelf no longer parses json and expects the receiving system to handle it. How to achieve this with Graylog is described in this GitHub issue.

  • If the services.dbus module is enabled, then the user D-Bus session is now always socket activated. The associated options services.dbus.socketActivated and services.xserver.startDbusSession have therefore been removed and you will receive a warning if they are present in your configuration. This change makes the user D-Bus session available also for non-graphical logins.

  • The networking.wireless.iwd module now installs the upstream-provided 80-iwd.link file, which sets the NamePolicy= for all wlan devices to “keep kernel”, to avoid race conditions between iwd and networkd. If you don’t want this, you can set systemd.network.links."80-iwd" = lib.mkForce {}.

  • rubyMinimal was removed due to being unused and unusable. The default ruby interpreter includes JIT support, which makes it reference it’s compiler. Since JIT support is probably needed by some Gems, it was decided to enable this feature with all cc references by default, and allow to build a Ruby derivation without references to cc, by setting jitSupport = false; in an overlay. See #90151 for more info.

  • Setting services.openssh.authorizedKeysFiles now also affects which keys security.pam.enableSSHAgentAuth will use. WARNING: If you are using these options in combination do make sure that any key paths you use are present in services.openssh.authorizedKeysFiles!

  • The option fonts.enableFontDir has been renamed to fonts.fontDir.enable. The path of font directory has also been changed to /run/current-system/sw/share/X11/fonts, for consistency with other X11 resources.

  • A number of options have been renamed in the kicad interface. oceSupport has been renamed to withOCE, withOCCT has been renamed to withOCC, ngspiceSupport has been renamed to withNgspice, and scriptingSupport has been renamed to withScripting. Additionally, kicad/base.nix no longer provides default argument values since these are provided by kicad/default.nix.

  • The socket for the pdns-recursor module was moved from /var/lib/pdns-recursor to /run/pdns-recursor to match upstream.

  • Paperwork was updated to version 2. The on-disk format slightly changed, and it is not possible to downgrade from Paperwork 2 back to Paperwork 1.3. Back your documents up before upgrading. See this thread for more details.

  • PowerDNS has been updated from 4.2.x to 4.3.x. Please be sure to review the Upgrade Notes provided by upstream before upgrading. Worth specifically noting is that the service now runs entirely as a dedicated pdns user, instead of starting as root and dropping privileges, as well as the default socket-dir location changing from /var/lib/powerdns to /run/pdns.

  • The mediatomb service is now using by default the new and maintained fork gerbera package instead of the unmaintained mediatomb package. If you want to keep the old behavior, you must declare it with:

    {
      services.mediatomb.package = pkgs.mediatomb;
    }
    

    One new option openFirewall has been introduced which defaults to false. If you relied on the service declaration to add the firewall rules itself before, you should now declare it with:

    {
      services.mediatomb.openFirewall = true;
    }
    
  • xfsprogs was update from 4.19 to 5.11. It now enables reflink support by default on filesystem creation. Support for reflinks was added with an experimental status to kernel 4.9 and deemed stable in kernel 4.16. If you want to be able to mount XFS filesystems created with this release of xfsprogs on kernel releases older than those, you need to format them with mkfs.xfs -m reflink=0.

  • The uWSGI server is now built with POSIX capabilities. As a consequence, root is no longer required in emperor mode and the service defaults to running as the unprivileged uwsgi user. Any additional capability can be added via the new option services.uwsgi.capabilities. The previous behaviour can be restored by setting:

    {
      services.uwsgi.user = "root";
      services.uwsgi.group = "root";
      services.uwsgi.instance =
        {
          uid = "uwsgi";
          gid = "uwsgi";
        };
    }
    

    Another incompatibility from the previous release is that vassals running under a different user or group need to use immediate-{uid,gid} instead of the usual uid,gid options.

  • btc1 has been abandoned upstream, and removed.

  • cpp_ethereum (aleth) has been abandoned upstream, and removed.

  • riak-cs package removed along with services.riak-cs module.

  • stanchion package removed along with services.stanchion module.

  • mutt has been updated to a new major version (2.x), which comes with some backward incompatible changes that are described in the release notes for Mutt 2.0.

  • vim and neovim switched to Python 3, dropping all Python 2 support.

  • networking.wireguard.interfaces.<name>.generatePrivateKeyFile, which is off by default, had a chmod race condition fixed. As an aside, the parent directory’s permissions were widened, and the key files were made owner-writable. This only affects newly created keys. However, if the exact permissions are important for your setup, read #121294.

  • boot.zfs.forceImportAll previously did nothing, but has been fixed. However its default has been changed to false to preserve the existing default behaviour. If you have this explicitly set to true, please note that your non-root pools will now be forcibly imported.

  • openafs now points to openafs_1_8, which is the new stable release. OpenAFS 1.6 was removed.

  • The WireGuard module gained a new option networking.wireguard.interfaces.<name>.peers.*.dynamicEndpointRefreshSeconds that implements refreshing the IP of DNS-based endpoints periodically (which WireGuard itself cannot do).

  • MariaDB has been updated to 10.5. Before you upgrade, it would be best to take a backup of your database and read Incompatible Changes Between 10.4 and 10.5. After the upgrade you will need to run mysql_upgrade.

  • The TokuDB storage engine dropped in mariadb 10.5 and removed in mariadb 10.6. It is recommended to switch to RocksDB. See also TokuDB and MDEV-19780: Remove the TokuDB storage engine.

  • The openldap module now has support for OLC-style configuration, users of the configDir option may wish to migrate. If you continue to use configDir, ensure that olcPidFile is set to /run/slapd/slapd.pid.

    As a result, extraConfig and extraDatabaseConfig are removed. To help with migration, you can convert your slapd.conf file to OLC configuration with the following script (find the location of this configuration file by running systemctl status openldap, it is the -f option.

    $ TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
    $ slaptest -f /path/to/slapd.conf -F $TMPDIR
    $ slapcat -F $TMPDIR -n0 -H 'ldap:///???(!(objectClass=olcSchemaConfig))'
    

    This will dump your current configuration in LDIF format, which should be straightforward to convert into Nix settings. This does not show your schema configuration, as this is unnecessarily verbose for users of the default schemas and slaptest is buggy with schemas directly in the config file.

  • Amazon EC2 and OpenStack Compute (nova) images now re-fetch instance meta data and user data from the instance metadata service (IMDS) on each boot. For example: stopping an EC2 instance, changing its user data, and restarting the instance will now cause it to fetch and apply the new user data.

    Warning

    Specifically, /etc/ec2-metadata is re-populated on each boot. Some NixOS scripts that read from this directory are guarded to only run if the files they want to manipulate do not already exist, and so will not re-apply their changes if the IMDS response changes. Examples: root’s SSH key is only added if /root/.ssh/authorized_keys does not exist, and SSH host keys are only set from user data if they do not exist in /etc/ssh.

  • The rspamd services is now sandboxed. It is run as a dynamic user instead of root, so secrets and other files may have to be moved or their permissions may have to be fixed. The sockets are now located in /run/rspamd instead of /run.

  • Enabling the Tor client no longer silently also enables and configures Privoxy, and the services.tor.client.privoxy.enable option has been removed. To enable Privoxy, and to configure it to use Tor’s faster port, use the following configuration:

    {
      opt-services.privoxy.enable = true;
      opt-services.privoxy.enableTor = true;
    }
    
  • The services.tor module has a new exhaustively typed services.tor.settings option following RFC 0042; backward compatibility with old options has been preserved when aliasing was possible. The corresponding systemd service has been hardened, but there is a chance that the service still requires more permissions, so please report any related trouble on the bugtracker. Onion services v3 are now supported in services.tor.relay.onionServices. A new services.tor.openFirewall option as been introduced for allowing connections on all the TCP ports configured.

  • The options services.slurm.dbdserver.storagePass and services.slurm.dbdserver.configFile have been removed. Use services.slurm.dbdserver.storagePassFile instead to provide the database password. Extra config options can be given via the option services.slurm.dbdserver.extraConfig. The actual configuration file is created on the fly on startup of the service. This avoids that the password gets exposed in the nix store.

  • The wafHook hook does not wrap Python anymore. Packages depending on wafHook need to include any Python into their nativeBuildInputs.

  • Starting with version 1.7.0, the project formerly named CodiMD is now named HedgeDoc. New installations will no longer use the old name for users, state directories and such, this needs to be considered when moving state to a more recent NixOS installation. Based on system.stateVersion, existing installations will continue to work.

  • The fish-foreign-env package has been replaced with fishPlugins.foreign-env, in which the fish functions have been relocated to the vendor_functions.d directory to be loaded automatically.

  • The prometheus json exporter is now managed by the prometheus community. Together with additional features some backwards incompatibilities were introduced. Most importantly the exporter no longer accepts a fixed command-line parameter to specify the URL of the endpoint serving JSON. It now expects this URL to be passed as an URL parameter, when scraping the exporter’s /probe endpoint. In the prometheus scrape configuration the scrape target might look like this:

    http://some.json-exporter.host:7979/probe?target=https://example.com/some/json/endpoint
    

    Existing configuration for the exporter needs to be updated, but can partially be re-used. Documentation is available in the upstream repository and a small example for NixOS is available in the corresponding NixOS test.

    These changes also affect services.prometheus.exporters.rspamd.enable, which is just a preconfigured instance of the json exporter.

    For more information, take a look at the official documentation of the json_exporter.

  • Androidenv was updated, removing the includeDocs and lldbVersions arguments. Docs only covered a single version of the Android SDK, LLDB is now bundled with the NDK, and both are no longer available to download from the Android package repositories. Additionally, since the package lists have been updated, some older versions of Android packages may not be bundled. If you depend on older versions of Android packages, we recommend overriding the repo.

    Android packages are now loaded from a repo.json file created by parsing Android repo XML files. The arguments repoJson and repoXmls have been added to allow overriding the built-in androidenv repo.json with your own. Additionally, license files are now written to allow compatibility with Gradle-based tools, and the extraLicenses argument has been added to accept more SDK licenses if your project requires it. See the androidenv documentation for more details.

  • The attribute mpi is now consistently used to provide a default, system-wide MPI implementation. The default implementation is openmpi, which has been used before by all derivations affects by this change. Note that all packages that have used mpi ? null in the input for optional MPI builds, have been changed to the boolean input parameter useMpi to enable building with MPI. Building all packages with mpich instead of the default openmpi can now be achieved like this:

    self: super:
    {
      mpi = super.mpich;
    }
    
  • The Searx module has been updated with the ability to configure the service declaratively and uWSGI integration. The option services.searx.configFile has been renamed to services.searx.settingsFile for consistency with the new services.searx.settings. In addition, the searx uid and gid reservations have been removed since they were not necessary: the service is now running with a dynamically allocated uid.

  • The libinput module has been updated with the ability to configure mouse and touchpad settings separately. The options in services.xserver.libinput have been renamed to services.xserver.libinput.touchpad, while there is a new services.xserver.libinput.mouse for mouse related configuration.

    Since touchpad options no longer apply to all devices, you may want to replicate your touchpad configuration in mouse section.

  • ALSA OSS emulation (sound.enableOSSEmulation) is now disabled by default.

  • Thinkfan as been updated to 1.2.x, which comes with a new YAML based configuration format. For this reason, several NixOS options of the thinkfan module have been changed to non-backward compatible types. In addition, a new services.thinkfan.settings option has been added.

    Please read the thinkfan documentation before updating.

  • Adobe Flash Player support has been dropped from the tree. In particular, the following packages no longer support it:

    • chromium

    • firefox

    • qt48

    • qt5.qtwebkit

    Additionally, packages flashplayer and hal-flash were removed along with the services.flashpolicyd module.

  • The security.rngd module has been removed. It was disabled by default in 20.09 as it was functionally redundant with krngd in the linux kernel. It is not necessary for any device that the kernel recognises as an hardware RNG, as it will automatically run the krngd task to periodically collect random data from the device and mix it into the kernel’s RNG.

    The default SMTP port for GitLab has been changed to 25 from its previous default of 465. If you depended on this default, you should now set the services.gitlab.smtp.port option.

  • The default version of ImageMagick has been updated from 6 to 7. You can use imagemagick6, imagemagick6_light, and imagemagick6Big if you need the older version.

  • services.xserver.videoDrivers no longer uses the deprecated cirrus and vesa device dependent X drivers by default. It also enables both amdgpu and nouveau drivers by default now.

  • The kindlegen package is gone, because it is no longer supported or hosted by Amazon. Sadly, its replacement, Kindle Previewer, has no Linux support. However, there are other ways to generate MOBI files. See the discussion for more info.

  • The apacheKafka packages are now built with version-matched JREs. Versions 2.6 and above, the ones that recommend it, use jdk11, while versions below remain on jdk8. The NixOS service has been adjusted to start the service using the same version as the package, adjustable with the new services.apache-kafka.jre option. Furthermore, the default list of services.apache-kafka.jvmOptions have been removed. You should set your own according to the upstream documentation for your Kafka version.

  • The kodi package has been modified to allow concise addon management. Consider the following configuration from previous releases of NixOS to install kodi, including the kodiPackages.inputstream-adaptive and kodiPackages.vfs-sftp addons:

    {
      environment.systemPackages = [
        pkgs.kodi
      ];
    
      nixpkgs.config.kodi = {
        enableInputStreamAdaptive = true;
        enableVFSSFTP = true;
      };
    }
    

    All Kodi config flags have been removed, and as a result the above configuration should now be written as:

    {
      environment.systemPackages = [
        (pkgs.kodi.withPackages (p: with p; [
          inputstream-adaptive
          vfs-sftp
        ]))
      ];
    }
    
  • environment.defaultPackages now includes the nano package. If pkgs.nano is not added to the list, make sure another editor is installed and the EDITOR environment variable is set to it. Environment variables can be set using environment.variables.

  • services.minio.dataDir changed type to a list of paths, required for specifying multiple data directories for using with erasure coding. Currently, the service doesn’t enforce nor checks the correct number of paths to correspond to minio requirements.

  • All CUDA toolkit versions prior to CUDA 10 have been removed.

  • The kbdKeymaps package was removed since dvp and neo are now included in kbd. If you want to use the Programmer Dvorak Keyboard Layout, you have to use dvorak-programmer in console.keyMap now instead of dvp. In services.xserver.xkbVariant it’s still dvp.

  • The babeld service is now being run as an unprivileged user. To achieve that the module configures skip-kernel-setup true and takes care of setting forwarding and rp_filter sysctls by itself as well as for each interface in services.babeld.interfaces.

  • The services.zigbee2mqtt.config option has been renamed to services.zigbee2mqtt.settings and now follows RFC 0042.

The yadm dotfile manager has been updated from 2.x to 3.x, which has new (XDG) default locations for some data/state files. Most yadm commands will fail and print a legacy path warning (which describes how to upgrade/migrate your repository). If you have scripts, daemons, scheduled jobs, shell profiles, etc. that invoke yadm, expect them to fail or misbehave until you perform this migration and prepare accordingly.

  • Instead of determining services.radicale.package automatically based on system.stateVersion, the latest version is always used because old versions are not officially supported.

    Furthermore, Radicale’s systemd unit was hardened which might break some deployments. In particular, a non-default filesystem_folder has to be added to systemd.services.radicale.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths if the deprecated services.radicale.config is used.

  • In the security.acme module, use of --reuse-key parameter for Lego has been removed. It was introduced for HKPK, but this security feature is now deprecated. It is a better security practice to rotate key pairs instead of always keeping the same. If you need to keep this parameter, you can add it back using extraLegoRenewFlags as an option for the appropriate certificate.

Other Notable Changes

  • stdenv.lib has been deprecated and will break eval in 21.11. Please use pkgs.lib instead. See #108938 for details.

  • GNURadio has a pkgs attribute set, and there’s a gnuradio.callPackage function that extends pkgs with a mkDerivation, and a mkDerivationWith, like Qt5. Now all gnuradio.pkgs are defined with gnuradio.callPackage and some packages that depend on gnuradio are defined with this as well.

  • Privoxy has been updated to version 3.0.32 (See announcement). Compared to the previous release, Privoxy has gained support for HTTPS inspection (still experimental), Brotli decompression, several new filters and lots of bug fixes, including security ones. In addition, the package is now built with compression and external filters support, which were previously disabled.

    Regarding the NixOS module, new options for HTTPS inspection have been added and services.privoxy.extraConfig has been replaced by the new services.privoxy.settings (See RFC 0042 for the motivation).

  • Kodi has been updated to version 19.1 “Matrix”. See the announcement for further details.

  • The services.packagekit.backend option has been removed as it only supported a single setting which would always be the default. Instead new RFC 0042 compliant services.packagekit.settings and services.packagekit.vendorSettings options have been introduced.

  • Nginx has been updated to stable version 1.20.0. Now nginx uses the zlib-ng library by default.

  • KDE Gear (formerly KDE Applications) is upgraded to 21.04, see its release notes for details.

    The kdeApplications package set is now kdeGear, in keeping with the new name. The old name remains for compatibility, but it is deprecated.

  • Libreswan has been updated to version 4.4. The package now includes example configurations and manual pages by default. The NixOS module has been changed to use the upstream systemd units and write the configuration in the /etc/ipsec.d/ directory. In addition, two new options have been added to specify connection policies (services.libreswan.policies) and disable send/receive redirects (services.libreswan.disableRedirects).

  • The Mailman NixOS module (services.mailman) has a new option services.mailman.enablePostfix, defaulting to true, that controls integration with Postfix.

    If this option is disabled, default MTA config becomes not set and you should set the options in services.mailman.settings.mta according to the desired configuration as described in Mailman documentation.

  • The default-version of nextcloud is nextcloud21. Please note that it’s not possible to upgrade nextcloud across multiple major versions! This means that it’s e.g. not possible to upgrade from nextcloud18 to nextcloud20 in a single deploy and most 20.09 users will have to upgrade to nextcloud20 first.

    The package can be manually upgraded by setting services.nextcloud.package to nextcloud21.

  • The setting services.redis.bind defaults to 127.0.0.1 now, making Redis listen on the loopback interface only, and not all public network interfaces.

  • NixOS now emits a deprecation warning if systemd’s StartLimitInterval setting is used in a serviceConfig section instead of in a unitConfig; that setting is deprecated and now undocumented for the service section by systemd upstream, but still effective and somewhat buggy there, which can be confusing. See #45785 for details.

    All services should use systemd.services.name.startLimitIntervalSec or StartLimitIntervalSec in systemd.services.name.unitConfig instead.

  • The mediatomb service declares new options. It also adapts existing options so the configuration generation is now lazy. The existing option customCfg (defaults to false), when enabled, stops the service configuration generation completely. It then expects the users to provide their own correct configuration at the right location (whereas the configuration was generated and not used at all before). The new option transcodingOption (defaults to no) allows a generated configuration. It makes the mediatomb service pulls the necessary runtime dependencies in the nix store (whereas it was generated with hardcoded values before). The new option mediaDirectories allows the users to declare autoscan media directories from their nixos configuration:

    {
      services.mediatomb.mediaDirectories = [
        { path = "/var/lib/mediatomb/pictures"; recursive = false; hidden-files = false; }
        { path = "/var/lib/mediatomb/audio"; recursive = true; hidden-files = false; }
      ];
    }
    
  • The Unbound DNS resolver service (services.unbound) has been refactored to allow reloading, control sockets and to fix startup ordering issues.

    It is now possible to enable a local UNIX control socket for unbound by setting the services.unbound.localControlSocketPath option.

    Previously we just applied a very minimal set of restrictions and trusted unbound to properly drop root privs and capabilities.

    As of this we are (for the most part) just using the upstream example unit file for unbound. The main difference is that we start unbound as unbound user with the required capabilities instead of letting unbound do the chroot & uid/gid changes.

    The upstream unit configuration this is based on is a lot stricter with all kinds of permissions then our previous variant. It also came with the default of having the Type set to notify, therefore we are now also using the unbound-with-systemd package here. Unbound will start up, read the configuration files and start listening on the configured ports before systemd will declare the unit active (running). This will likely help with startup order and the occasional race condition during system activation where the DNS service is started but not yet ready to answer queries. Services depending on nss-lookup.target or unbound.service are now be able to use unbound when those targets have been reached.

    Additionally to the much stricter runtime environment the /dev/urandom mount lines we previously had in the code (that randomly failed during the stop-phase) have been removed as systemd will take care of those for us.

    The preStart script is now only required if we enabled the trust anchor updates (which are still enabled by default).

    Another benefit of the refactoring is that we can now issue reloads via either pkill -HUP unbound and systemctl reload unbound to reload the running configuration without taking the daemon offline. A prerequisite of this was that unbound configuration is available on a well known path on the file system. We are using the path /etc/unbound/unbound.conf as that is the default in the CLI tooling which in turn enables us to use unbound-control without passing a custom configuration location.

    The module has also been reworked to be RFC 0042 compliant. As such, services.unbound.extraConfig has been removed and replaced by services.unbound.settings. services.unbound.interfaces has been renamed to services.unbound.settings.server.interface.

    services.unbound.forwardAddresses and services.unbound.allowedAccess have also been changed to use the new settings interface. You can follow the instructions when executing nixos-rebuild to upgrade your configuration to use the new interface.

  • The services.dnscrypt-proxy2 module now takes the upstream’s example configuration and updates it with the user’s settings. An option has been added to restore the old behaviour if you prefer to declare the configuration from scratch.

  • NixOS now defaults to the unified cgroup hierarchy (cgroupsv2). See the Fedora Article for 31 for details on why this is desirable, and how it impacts containers.

    If you want to run containers with a runtime that does not yet support cgroupsv2, you can switch back to the old behaviour by setting systemd.enableUnifiedCgroupHierarchy = false; and rebooting.

  • PulseAudio was upgraded to 14.0, with changes to the handling of default sinks. See its release notes.

  • GNOME users may wish to delete their ~/.config/pulse due to the changes to stream routing logic. See PulseAudio bug 832 for more information.

  • The zookeeper package does not provide zooInspector.sh anymore, as that “contrib” has been dropped from upstream releases.

  • In the ACME module, the data used to build the hash for the account directory has changed to accommodate new features to reduce account rate limit issues. This will trigger new account creation on the first rebuild following this update. No issues are expected to arise from this, thanks to the new account creation handling.

  • users.users.name.createHome now always ensures home directory permissions to be 0700. Permissions had previously been ignored for already existing home directories, possibly leaving them readable by others. The option’s description was incorrect regarding ownership management and has been simplified greatly.

  • When defining a new user, one of users.users.name.isNormalUser and users.users.name.isSystemUser is now required. This is to prevent accidentally giving a UID above 1000 to system users, which could have unexpected consequences, like running user activation scripts for system users. Note that users defined with an explicit UID below 500 are exempted from this check, as users.users.name.isSystemUser has no effect for those.

  • The security.apparmor module, for the AppArmor Mandatory Access Control system, has been substantially improved along with related tools, so that module maintainers can now more easily write AppArmor profiles for NixOS. The most notable change on the user-side is the new option security.apparmor.policies, replacing the previous profiles option to provide a way to disable a profile and to select whether to confine in enforce mode (default) or in complain mode (see journalctl -b --grep apparmor). Security-minded users may also want to enable security.apparmor.killUnconfinedConfinables, at the cost of having some of their processes killed when updating to a NixOS version introducing new AppArmor profiles.

  • The GNOME desktop manager once again installs gnome.epiphany by default.

  • NixOS now generates empty /etc/netgroup. /etc/netgroup defines network-wide groups and may affect to setups using NIS.

  • Platforms, like stdenv.hostPlatform, no longer have a platform attribute. It has been (mostly) flattened away:

    • platform.gcc is now gcc

    • platform.kernel* is now linux-kernel.*

    Additionally, platform.kernelArch moved to the top level as linuxArch to match the other *Arch variables.

    The platform grouping of these things never meant anything, and was just a historial/implementation artifact that was overdue removal.

  • services.restic now uses a dedicated cache directory for every backup defined in services.restic.backups. The old global cache directory, /root/.cache/restic, is now unused and can be removed to free up disk space.

  • isync: The isync compatibility wrapper was removed and the Master/Slave terminology has been deprecated and should be replaced with Far/Near in the configuration file.

  • The nix-gc service now accepts randomizedDelaySec (default: 0) and persistent (default: true) parameters. By default nix-gc will now run immediately if it would have been triggered at least once during the time when the timer was inactive.

  • The rustPlatform.buildRustPackage function is split into several hooks: cargoSetupHook to set up vendoring for Cargo-based projects, cargoBuildHook to build a project using Cargo, cargoInstallHook to install a project using Cargo, and cargoCheckHook to run tests in Cargo-based projects. With this change, mixed-language projects can use the relevant hooks within builders other than buildRustPackage. However, these changes also required several API changes to buildRustPackage itself:

    • The target argument was removed. Instead, buildRustPackage will always use the same target as the C/C++ compiler that is used.

    • The cargoParallelTestThreads argument was removed. Parallel tests are now disabled through dontUseCargoParallelTests.

  • The rustPlatform.maturinBuildHook hook was added. This hook can be used with buildPythonPackage to build Python packages that are written in Rust and use Maturin as their build tool.

  • Kubernetes has deprecated docker as container runtime. As a consequence, the Kubernetes module now has support for configuration of custom remote container runtimes and enables containerd by default. Note that containerd is more strict regarding container image OCI-compliance. As an example, images with CMD or ENTRYPOINT defined as strings (not lists) will fail on containerd, while working fine on docker. Please test your setup and container images with containerd prior to upgrading.

  • The GitLab module now has support for automatic backups. A schedule can be set with the services.gitlab.backup.startAt option.

  • Prior to this release, systemd would also read system units from an undocumented /etc/systemd-mutable/system path. This path has been dropped from the defaults. That path (or others) can be re-enabled by adding it to the boot.extraSystemdUnitPaths list.

  • PostgreSQL 9.5 is scheduled EOL during the 21.05 life cycle and has been removed.

  • Xfce4 relies on GIO/GVfs for userspace virtual filesystem access in applications like thunar and gigolo. For that to work, the gvfs nixos service is enabled by default, and it can be configured with the specific package that provides GVfs. Until now Xfce4 was setting it to use a lighter version of GVfs (without support for samba). To avoid conflicts with other desktop environments this setting has been dropped. Users that still want it should add the following to their system configuration:

    {
      services.gvfs.package = pkgs.gvfs.override { samba = null; };
    }
    
  • The newly enabled systemd-pstore.service now automatically evacuates crashdumps and panic logs from the persistent storage to /var/lib/systemd/pstore. This prevents NVRAM from filling up, which ensures the latest diagnostic data is always stored and alleviates problems with writing new boot configurations.

  • Nixpkgs now contains automatically packaged GNOME Shell extensions from the GNOME Extensions portal. You can find them, filed by their UUID, under gnome38Extensions attribute for GNOME 3.38 and under gnome40Extensions for GNOME 40. Finally, the gnomeExtensions attribute contains extensions for the latest GNOME Shell version in Nixpkgs, listed under a more human-friendly name. The unqualified attribute scope also contains manually packaged extensions. Note that the automatically packaged extensions are provided for convenience and are not checked or guaranteed to work.

  • Erlang/OTP versions older than R21 got dropped. We also dropped the cuter package, as it was purely an example of how to build a package. We also dropped lfe_1_2 as it could not build with R21+. Moving forward, we expect to only support 3 yearly releases of OTP.

Release 20.09 (“Nightingale”, 2020.10/27)

Support is planned until the end of June 2021, handing over to 21.05. (Plans have shifted by two months since release of 20.09.)

Highlights

In addition to 7349 new, 14442 updated, and 8181 removed packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Core version changes:

    • gcc: 9.2.0 -> 9.3.0

    • glibc: 2.30 -> 2.31

    • linux: still defaults to 5.4.x, all supported kernels available

    • mesa: 19.3.5 -> 20.1.7

  • Desktop Environments:

    • plasma5: 5.17.5 -> 5.18.5

    • kdeApplications: 19.12.3 -> 20.08.1

    • gnome3: 3.34 -> 3.36, see its release notes

    • cinnamon: added at 4.6

    • NixOS now distributes an official GNOME ISO

  • Programming Languages and Frameworks:

    • Agda ecosystem was heavily reworked (see more details below)

    • PHP now defaults to PHP 7.4, updated from 7.3

    • PHP 7.2 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 20.09 release

    • Python 3 now defaults to Python 3.8 instead of 3.7

    • Python 3.5 reached its upstream EOL at the end of September 2020: it has been removed from the list of available packages

  • Databases and Service Monitoring:

    • MariaDB has been updated to 10.4, MariaDB Galera to 26.4. Please read the related upgrade instructions under backwards incompatibilities before upgrading.

    • Zabbix now defaults to 5.0, updated from 4.4. Please read related sections under backwards compatibilities before upgrading.

  • Major module changes:

    • Quickly configure a complete, private, self-hosted video conferencing solution with the new Jitsi Meet module.

    • Two new options, authorizedKeysCommand and authorizedKeysCommandUser, have been added to the openssh module. If you have AuthorizedKeysCommand in your services.openssh.extraConfig you should make use of these new options instead.

    • There is a new module for Podman (virtualisation.podman), a drop-in replacement for the Docker command line.

    • The new virtualisation.containers module manages configuration shared by the CRI-O and Podman modules.

    • Declarative Docker containers are renamed from docker-containers to virtualisation.oci-containers.containers. This is to make it possible to use podman instead of docker.

    • The new option documentation.man.generateCaches has been added to automatically generate the man-db caches, which are needed by utilities like whatis and apropos. The caches are generated during the build of the NixOS configuration: since this can be expensive when a large number of packages are installed, the feature is disabled by default.

    • services.postfix.sslCACert was replaced by services.postfix.tlsTrustedAuthorities which now defaults to system certificate authorities.

    • The various documented workarounds to use steam have been converted to a module. programs.steam.enable enables steam, controller support and the workarounds.

    • Support for built-in LCDs in various pieces of Logitech hardware (keyboards and USB speakers). hardware.logitech.lcd.enable enables support for all hardware supported by the g15daemon project.

    • The GRUB module gained support for basic password protection, which allows to restrict non-default entries in the boot menu to one or more users. The users and passwords are defined via the option boot.loader.grub.users. Note: Password support is only available in GRUB version 2.

  • NixOS module changes:

    • The NixOS module system now supports freeform modules as a mix between types.attrsOf and types.submodule. These allow you to explicitly declare a subset of options while still permitting definitions without an associated option. See the section called “Freeform modules” for how to use them.

    • Following its deprecation in 20.03, the Perl NixOS test driver has been removed. All remaining tests have been ported to the Python test framework. Code outside nixpkgs using make-test.nix or testing.nix needs to be ported to make-test-python.nix and testing-python.nix respectively.

    • Subordinate GID and UID mappings are now set up automatically for all normal users. This will make container tools like Podman work as non-root users out of the box.

  • Starting with this release, the hydra-build-result nixos-YY.MM branches no longer exist in the deprecated nixpkgs-channels repository. These branches are now in the main nixpkgs repository.

New Services

In addition to 1119 new, 118 updated, and 476 removed options; 61 new modules were added since the last release:

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • MariaDB has been updated to 10.4, MariaDB Galera to 26.4. Before you upgrade, it would be best to take a backup of your database. For MariaDB Galera Cluster, see Upgrading from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 with Galera Cluster instead. Before doing the upgrade read Incompatible Changes Between 10.3 and 10.4. After the upgrade you will need to run mysql_upgrade. MariaDB 10.4 introduces a number of changes to the authentication process, intended to make things easier and more intuitive. See Authentication from MariaDB 10.4. unix_socket auth plugin does not use a password, and uses the connecting user’s UID instead. When a new MariaDB data directory is initialized, two MariaDB users are created and can be used with new unix_socket auth plugin, as well as traditional mysql_native_password plugin: root@localhost and mysql@localhost. To actually use the traditional mysql_native_password plugin method, one must run the following:

    {
    services.mysql.initialScript = pkgs.writeText "mariadb-init.sql" ''
      ALTER USER root@localhost IDENTIFIED VIA mysql_native_password USING PASSWORD("verysecret");
    '';
    }
    

    When MariaDB data directory is just upgraded (not initialized), the users are not created or modified.

  • MySQL server is now started with additional systemd sandbox/hardening options for better security. The PrivateTmp, ProtectHome, and ProtectSystem options may be problematic when MySQL is attempting to read from or write to your filesystem anywhere outside of its own state directory, for example when calling LOAD DATA INFILE or SELECT * INTO OUTFILE. In this scenario a variant of the following may be required: - allow MySQL to read from /home and /tmp directories when using LOAD DATA INFILE

    {
      systemd.services.mysql.serviceConfig.ProtectHome = lib.mkForce "read-only";
    }
    

    - allow MySQL to write to custom folder /var/data when using SELECT * INTO OUTFILE, assuming the mysql user has write access to /var/data

    {
      systemd.services.mysql.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths = [ "/var/data" ];
    }
    

    The MySQL service no longer runs its systemd service startup script as root anymore. A dedicated non root super user account is required for operation. This means users with an existing MySQL or MariaDB database server are required to run the following SQL statements as a super admin user before upgrading:

    CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS 'mysql'@'localhost' identified with unix_socket;
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'mysql'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
    

    If you use MySQL instead of MariaDB please replace unix_socket with auth_socket. If you have changed the value of services.mysql.user from the default of mysql to a different user please change 'mysql'@'localhost' to the corresponding user instead.

  • Zabbix now defaults to 5.0, updated from 4.4. Please carefully read through the upgrade guide and apply any changes required. Be sure to take special note of the section on enabling extended range of numeric (float) values as you will need to apply this database migration manually.

    If you are using Zabbix Server with a MySQL or MariaDB database you should note that using a character set of utf8 and a collate of utf8_bin has become mandatory with this release. See the upstream issue for further discussion. Before upgrading you should check the character set and collation used by your database and ensure they are correct:

    SELECT
      default_character_set_name,
      default_collation_name
    FROM
      information_schema.schemata
    WHERE
      schema_name = 'zabbix';
    

    If these values are not correct you should take a backup of your database and convert the character set and collation as required. Here is an example of how to do so, taken from the Zabbix forums:

    ALTER DATABASE `zabbix` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
    
    -- the following will produce a list of SQL commands you should subsequently execute
    SELECT CONCAT("ALTER TABLE ", TABLE_NAME," CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;") AS ExecuteTheString
    FROM information_schema.`COLUMNS`
    WHERE table_schema = "zabbix" AND COLLATION_NAME = "utf8_general_ci";
    
  • maxx package removed along with services.xserver.desktopManager.maxx module. Please migrate to cdesktopenv and services.xserver.desktopManager.cde module.

  • The matrix-synapse module no longer includes optional dependencies by default, they have to be added through the plugins option.

  • buildGoModule now internally creates a vendor directory in the source tree for downloaded modules instead of using go’s module proxy protocol. This storage format is simpler and therefore less likely to break with future versions of go. As a result buildGoModule switched from modSha256 to the vendorSha256 attribute to pin fetched version data.

  • Grafana is now built without support for phantomjs by default. Phantomjs support has been deprecated in Grafana and the phantomjs project is currently unmaintained. It can still be enabled by providing phantomJsSupport = true to the package instantiation:

    {
      services.grafana.package = pkgs.grafana.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: rec {
        phantomJsSupport = true;
      });
    }
    
  • The supybot module now uses /var/lib/supybot as its default stateDir path if stateVersion is 20.09 or higher. It also enables a number of systemd sandboxing options which may possibly interfere with some plugins. If this is the case you can disable the options through attributes in systemd.services.supybot.serviceConfig.

  • The security.duosec.skey option, which stored a secret in the nix store, has been replaced by a new security.duosec.secretKeyFile option for better security.

    security.duosec.ikey has been renamed to security.duosec.integrationKey.

  • vmware has been removed from the services.x11.videoDrivers defaults. For VMWare guests set virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable to true which will include the appropriate drivers.

  • The initrd SSH support now uses OpenSSH rather than Dropbear to allow the use of Ed25519 keys and other OpenSSH-specific functionality. Host keys must now be in the OpenSSH format, and at least one pre-generated key must be specified.

    If you used the boot.initrd.network.ssh.host*Key options, you’ll get an error explaining how to convert your host keys and migrate to the new boot.initrd.network.ssh.hostKeys option. Otherwise, if you don’t have any host keys set, you’ll need to generate some; see the hostKeys option documentation for instructions.

  • Since this release there’s an easy way to customize your PHP install to get a much smaller base PHP with only wanted extensions enabled. See the following snippet installing a smaller PHP with the extensions imagick, opcache, pdo and pdo_mysql loaded:

    {
      environment.systemPackages = [
        (pkgs.php.withExtensions
          ({ all, ... }: with all; [
            imagick
            opcache
            pdo
            pdo_mysql
          ])
        )
      ];
    }
    

    The default php attribute hasn’t lost any extensions. The opcache extension has been added. All upstream PHP extensions are available under php.extensions.<name?>.

    All PHP config flags have been removed for the following reasons:

  • The updated php attribute is now easily customizable to your liking by using php.withExtensions or php.buildEnv instead of writing config files or changing configure flags.

  • The remaining configuration flags can now be set directly on the php attribute. For example, instead of

    {
      php.override {
        config.php.embed = true;
        config.php.apxs2 = false;
      }
    }
    

    you should now write

    {
      php.override {
        embedSupport = true;
        apxs2Support = false;
      }
    }
    
  • The ACME module has been overhauled for simplicity and maintainability. Cert generation now implicitly uses the acme user, and the security.acme.certs._name_.user option has been removed. Instead, certificate access from other services is now managed through group permissions. The module no longer runs lego twice under certain conditions, and will correctly renew certificates if their configuration is changed. Services which reload nginx and httpd after certificate renewal are now properly configured too so you no longer have to do this manually if you are using HTTPS enabled virtual hosts. A mechanism for regenerating certs on demand has also been added and documented.

  • Gollum received a major update to version 5.x and you may have to change some links in your wiki when migrating from gollum 4.x. More information can be found here.

  • Deluge 2.x was added and is used as default for new NixOS installations where stateVersion is >= 20.09. If you are upgrading from a previous NixOS version, you can set service.deluge.package = pkgs.deluge-2_x to upgrade to Deluge 2.x and migrate the state to the new format. Be aware that backwards state migrations are not supported by Deluge.

  • Nginx web server now starting with additional sandbox/hardening options. By default, write access to /var/log/nginx and /var/cache/nginx is allowed. To allow writing to other folders, use systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths

    {
      systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths = [ "/var/www" ];
    }
    

    Nginx is also started with the systemd option ProtectHome = mkDefault true; which forbids it to read anything from /home, /root and /run/user (see ProtectHome docs for details). If you require serving files from home directories, you may choose to set e.g.

    {
      systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ProtectHome = "read-only";
    }
    
  • The NixOS options nesting.clone and nesting.children have been deleted, and replaced with named specialisation configurations.

    Replace a nesting.clone entry with:

    {
      specialisation.example-sub-configuration = {
        configuration = {
          ...
        };
    };
    

    Replace a nesting.children entry with:

    {
      specialisation.example-sub-configuration = {
        inheritParentConfig = false;
        configuration = {
          ...
        };
    };
    

    To switch to a specialised configuration at runtime you need to run:

    $ sudo /run/current-system/specialisation/example-sub-configuration/bin/switch-to-configuration test
    

    Before you would have used:

    $ sudo /run/current-system/fine-tune/child-1/bin/switch-to-configuration test
    
  • The Nginx log directory has been moved to /var/log/nginx, the cache directory to /var/cache/nginx. The option services.nginx.stateDir has been removed.

  • The httpd web server previously started its main process as root privileged, then ran worker processes as a less privileged identity user. This was changed to start all of httpd as a less privileged user (defined by services.httpd.user and services.httpd.group). As a consequence, all files that are needed for httpd to run (included configuration fragments, SSL certificates and keys, etc.) must now be readable by this less privileged user/group.

    The default value for services.httpd.mpm has been changed from prefork to event. Along with this change the default value for services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.http2 has been set to true.

  • The systemd-networkd option systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcp.CriticalConnection has been removed following upstream systemd’s deprecation of the same. It is recommended to use systemd.network.networks.<name>.networkConfig.KeepConfiguration instead. See systemd.network 5 for details.

  • The systemd-networkd option systemd.network.networks._name_.dhcpConfig has been renamed to systemd.network.networks.name.dhcpV4Config following upstream systemd’s documentation change. See systemd.network 5 for details.

  • In the picom module, several options that accepted floating point numbers encoded as strings (for example services.picom.activeOpacity) have been changed to the (relatively) new native float type. To migrate your configuration remove the quotes around the numbers.

  • When using buildBazelPackage from Nixpkgs, flat hash mode is now used for dependencies instead of recursive. This is to better allow using hashed mirrors where needed. As a result, these hashes will have changed.

  • The syntax of the PostgreSQL configuration file is now checked at build time. If your configuration includes a file inaccessible inside the build sandbox, set services.postgresql.checkConfig to false.

  • The rkt module has been removed, it was archived by upstream.

  • The Bazaar VCS is unmaintained and, as consequence of the Python 2 EOL, the packages bazaar and bazaarTools were removed. Breezy, the backward compatible fork of Bazaar (see the announcement), was packaged as breezy and can be used instead.

    Regarding Nixpkgs, fetchbzr, nix-prefetch-bzr and Bazaar support in Hydra will continue to work through Breezy.

  • In addition to the hostname, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN), which consists of ${networking.hostName} and ${networking.domain} is now added to /etc/hosts, to allow local FQDN resolution, as used by the hostname --fqdn command and other applications that try to determine the FQDN. These new entries take precedence over entries from the DNS which could cause regressions in some very specific setups. Additionally the hostname is now resolved to 127.0.0.2 instead of 127.0.1.1 to be consistent with what nss-myhostname (from systemd) returns. The old behaviour can e.g. be restored by using networking.hosts = lib.mkForce { "127.0.1.1" = [ config.networking.hostName ]; };.

  • The hostname (networking.hostName) must now be a valid DNS label (see RFC 1035, RFC 1123) and as such must not contain the domain part. This means that the hostname must start with a letter or digit, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. The maximum length is 63 characters. Additionally it is recommended to only use lower-case characters. If (e.g. for legacy reasons) a FQDN is required as the Linux kernel network node hostname (uname --nodename) the option boot.kernel.sysctl."kernel.hostname" can be used as a workaround (but be aware of the 64 character limit).

  • The GRUB specific option boot.loader.grub.extraInitrd has been replaced with the generic option boot.initrd.secrets. This option creates a secondary initrd from the specified files, rather than using a manually created initrd file. Due to an existing bug with boot.loader.grub.extraInitrd, it is not possible to directly boot an older generation that used that option. It is still possible to rollback to that generation if the required initrd file has not been deleted.

  • The DNSChain package and NixOS module have been removed from Nixpkgs as the software is unmaintained and can’t be built. For more information see issue #89205.

  • In the resilio module, services.resilio.httpListenAddr has been changed to listen to [::1] instead of 0.0.0.0.

  • sslh has been updated to version 1.21. The ssl probe must be renamed to tls in services.sslh.appendConfig.

  • Users of OpenAFS 1.6 must upgrade their services to OpenAFS 1.8! In this release, the OpenAFS package version 1.6.24 is marked broken but can be used during transition to OpenAFS 1.8.x. Use the options services.openafsClient.packages.module, services.openafsClient.packages.programs and services.openafsServer.package to select a different OpenAFS package. OpenAFS 1.6 will be removed in the next release. The package openafs and the service options will then silently point to the OpenAFS 1.8 release.

    See also the OpenAFS Administrator Guide for instructions. Beware of the following when updating servers:

    • The storage format of the server key has changed and the key must be converted before running the new release.

    • When updating multiple database servers, turn off the database servers from the highest IP down to the lowest with resting periods in between. Start up in reverse order. Do not concurrently run database servers working with different OpenAFS releases!

    • Update servers first, then clients.

  • Radicale’s default package has changed from 2.x to 3.x. An upgrade checklist can be found here. You can use the newer version in the NixOS service by setting the package to radicale3, which is done automatically if stateVersion is 20.09 or higher.

  • udpt experienced a complete rewrite from C++ to rust. The configuration format changed from ini to toml. The new configuration documentation can be found at the official website and example configuration is packaged in ${udpt}/share/udpt/udpt.toml.

  • We now have a unified services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin option interface to be used for every display-manager in NixOS.

  • The bitcoind module has changed to multi-instance, using submodules. Therefore, it is now mandatory to name each instance. To use this new multi-instance config with an existing bitcoind data directory and user, you have to adjust the original config, e.g.:

    {
      services.bitcoind = {
        enable = true;
        extraConfig = "...";
        ...
      };
    }
    

    To something similar:

    {
      services.bitcoind.mainnet = {
        enable = true;
        dataDir = "/var/lib/bitcoind";
        user = "bitcoin";
        extraConfig = "...";
        ...
      };
    }
    

    The key settings are:

    • dataDir - to continue using the same data directory.

    • user - to continue using the same user so that bitcoind maintains access to its files.

  • Graylog introduced a change in the LDAP server certificate validation behaviour for version 3.3.3 which might break existing setups. When updating Graylog from a version before 3.3.3 make sure to check the Graylog release info for information on how to avoid the issue.

  • The dokuwiki module has changed to multi-instance, using submodules. Therefore, it is now mandatory to name each instance. Moreover, forcing SSL by default has been dropped, so nginx.forceSSL and nginx.enableACME are no longer set to true. To continue using your service with the original SSL settings, you have to adjust the original config, e.g.:

    {
      services.dokuwiki = {
        enable = true;
        ...
      };
    }
    

    To something similar:

    {
      services.dokuwiki."mywiki" = {
        enable = true;
        nginx = {
          forceSSL = true;
          enableACME = true;
        };
        ...
      };
    }
    

    The base package has also been upgraded to the 2020-07-29 “Hogfather” release. Plugins might be incompatible or require upgrading.

  • The services.postgresql.dataDir option is now set to "/var/lib/postgresql/${cfg.package.psqlSchema}" regardless of your system.stateVersion. Users with an existing postgresql install that have a system.stateVersion of 17.03 or below should double check what the value of their services.postgresql.dataDir option is (/var/db/postgresql) and then explicitly set this value to maintain compatibility:

    {
      services.postgresql.dataDir = "/var/db/postgresql";
    }
    

    The postgresql module now expects there to be a database super user account called postgres regardless of your system.stateVersion. Users with an existing postgresql install that have a system.stateVersion of 17.03 or below should run the following SQL statements as a database super admin user before upgrading:

    CREATE ROLE postgres LOGIN SUPERUSER;
    
  • The USBGuard module now removes options and instead hardcodes values for IPCAccessControlFiles, ruleFiles, and auditFilePath. Audit logs can be found in the journal.

  • The NixOS module system now evaluates option definitions more strictly, allowing it to detect a larger set of problems. As a result, what previously evaluated may not do so anymore. See the PR that changed this for more info.

  • For NixOS configuration options, the type loaOf, after its initial deprecation in release 20.03, has been removed. In NixOS and Nixpkgs options using this type have been converted to attrsOf. For more information on this change have look at these links: issue #1800, PR #63103.

  • config.systemd.services.${name}.path now returns a list of paths instead of a colon-separated string.

  • Caddy module now uses Caddy v2 by default. Caddy v1 can still be used by setting services.caddy.package to pkgs.caddy1.

    New option services.caddy.adapter has been added.

  • The jellyfin module will use and stay on the Jellyfin version 10.5.5 if stateVersion is lower than 20.09. This is because significant changes were made to the database schema, and it is highly recommended to backup your instance before upgrading. After making your backup, you can upgrade to the latest version either by setting your stateVersion to 20.09 or higher, or set the services.jellyfin.package to pkgs.jellyfin. If you do not wish to upgrade Jellyfin, but want to change your stateVersion, you can set the value of services.jellyfin.package to pkgs.jellyfin_10_5.

  • The security.rngd service is now disabled by default. This choice was made because there’s krngd in the linux kernel space making it (for most usecases) functionally redundant.

  • The hardware.nvidia.optimus_prime.enable service has been renamed to hardware.nvidia.prime.sync.enable and has many new enhancements. Related nvidia prime settings may have also changed.

  • The package nextcloud17 has been removed and nextcloud18 was marked as insecure since both of them will will be EOL (end of life) within the lifetime of 20.09.

    It’s necessary to upgrade to nextcloud19:

    • From nextcloud17, you have to upgrade to nextcloud18 first as Nextcloud doesn’t allow going multiple major revisions forward in a single upgrade. This is possible by setting services.nextcloud.package to nextcloud18.

    • From nextcloud18, it’s possible to directly upgrade to nextcloud19 by setting services.nextcloud.package to nextcloud19.

  • The GNOME desktop manager no longer default installs gnome3.epiphany. It was chosen to do this as it has a usability breaking issue (see issue #98819) that makes it unsuitable to be a default app.

    Note

    Issue #98819 is now fixed and gnome3.epiphany is once again installed by default.

  • If you want to manage the configuration of wpa_supplicant outside of NixOS you must ensure that none of networking.wireless.networks, networking.wireless.extraConfig or networking.wireless.userControlled.enable is being used or true. Using any of those options will cause wpa_supplicant to be started with a NixOS generated configuration file instead of your own.

Other Notable Changes

  • SD images are now compressed by default using zstd. The compression for ISO images has also been changed to zstd, but ISO images are still not compressed by default.

  • services.journald.rateLimitBurst was updated from 1000 to 10000 to follow the new upstream systemd default.

  • The notmuch package moves its emacs-related binaries and emacs lisp files to a separate output. They’re not part of the default out output anymore - if you relied on the notmuch-emacs-mua binary or the emacs lisp files, access them via the notmuch.emacs output.

  • Device tree overlay support was improved in #79370 and now uses hardware.deviceTree.kernelPackage instead of hardware.deviceTree.base. hardware.deviceTree.overlays configuration was extended to support .dts files with symbols. Device trees can now be filtered by setting hardware.deviceTree.filter option.

  • The default output of buildGoPackage is now $out instead of $bin.

  • buildGoModule doCheck now defaults to true.

  • Packages built using buildRustPackage now use release mode for the checkPhase by default.

    Please note that Rust packages utilizing a custom build/install procedure (e.g. by using a Makefile) or test suites that rely on the structure of the target/ directory may break due to those assumptions. For further information, please read the Rust section in the Nixpkgs manual.

  • The cc- and binutils-wrapper’s “infix salt” and _BUILD_ and _TARGET_ user infixes have been replaced with with a “suffix salt” and suffixes and _FOR_BUILD and _FOR_TARGET. This matches the autotools convention for env vars which standard for these things, making interfacing with other tools easier.

  • Additional Git documentation (HTML and text files) is now available via the git-doc package.

  • Default algorithm for ZRAM swap was changed to zstd.

  • The installer now enables sshd by default. This improves installation on headless machines especially ARM single-board-computer. To login through ssh, either a password or an ssh key must be set for the root user or the nixos user.

  • The scripted networking system now uses .link files in /etc/systemd/network to configure mac address and link MTU, instead of the sometimes buggy network-link-* units, which have been removed. Bringing the interface up has been moved to the beginning of the network-addresses-* unit. Note this doesn’t require systemd-networkd - it’s udev that parses .link files. Extra care needs to be taken in the presence of legacy udev rules to rename interfaces, as MAC Address and MTU defined in these options can only match on the original link name. In such cases, you most likely want to create a 10-*.link file through systemd.network.links and set both name and MAC Address / MTU there.

  • Grafana received a major update to version 7.x. A plugin is now needed for image rendering support, and plugins must now be signed by default. More information can be found in the Grafana documentation.

  • The hardware.u2f module, which was installing udev rules was removed, as udev gained native support to handle FIDO security tokens.

  • The services.transmission module was enhanced with the new options: services.transmission.credentialsFile, services.transmission.openFirewall, and services.transmission.performanceNetParameters.

    transmission-daemon is now started with additional systemd sandbox/hardening options for better security. Please report any use case where this is not working well. In particular, the RootDirectory option newly set forbids uploading or downloading a torrent outside of the default directory configured at settings.download-dir. If you really need Transmission to access other directories, you must include those directories into the BindPaths of the service:

    {
      systemd.services.transmission.serviceConfig.BindPaths = [ "/path/to/alternative/download-dir" ];
    }
    

    Also, connection to the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) of transmission-daemon is now only available on the local network interface by default. Use:

    {
      services.transmission.settings.rpc-bind-address = "0.0.0.0";
    }
    

    to get the previous behavior of listening on all network interfaces.

  • With this release systemd-networkd (when enabled through networking.useNetworkd) has it’s netlink socket created through a systemd.socket unit. This gives us control over socket buffer sizes and other parameters. For larger setups where networkd has to create a lot of (virtual) devices the default buffer size (currently 128MB) is not enough.

    On a machine with >100 virtual interfaces (e.g., wireguard tunnels, VLANs, …), that all have to be brought up during system startup, the receive buffer size will spike for a brief period. Eventually some of the message will be dropped since there is not enough (permitted) buffer space available.

    By having systemd-networkd start with a netlink socket created by systemd we can configure the ReceiveBufferSize= parameter in the socket options (i.e. systemd.sockets.systemd-networkd.socketOptions.ReceiveBufferSize) without recompiling systemd-networkd.

    Since the actual memory requirements depend on hardware, timing, exact configurations etc. it isn’t currently possible to infer a good default from within the NixOS module system. Administrators are advised to monitor the logs of systemd-networkd for rtnl: kernel receive buffer overrun spam and increase the memory limit as they see fit.

    Note: Increasing the ReceiveBufferSize= doesn’t allocate any memory. It just increases the upper bound on the kernel side. The memory allocation depends on the amount of messages that are queued on the kernel side of the netlink socket.

  • Specifying mailboxes in the dovecot2 module as a list is deprecated and will break eval in 21.05. Instead, an attribute-set should be specified where the name should be the key of the attribute.

    This means that a configuration like this

    {
      services.dovecot2.mailboxes = [
        { name = "Junk";
          auto = "create";
        }
      ];
    }
    

    should now look like this:

    {
      services.dovecot2.mailboxes = {
        Junk.auto = "create";
      };
    }
    
  • netbeans was upgraded to 12.0 and now defaults to OpenJDK 11. This might cause problems if your projects depend on packages that were removed in Java 11.

  • nextcloud has been updated to v19.

    If you have an existing installation, please make sure that you’re on nextcloud18 before upgrading to nextcloud19 since Nextcloud doesn’t support upgrades across multiple major versions.

  • The nixos-run-vms script now deletes the previous run machines states on test startup. You can use the --keep-vm-state flag to match the previous behaviour and keep the same VM state between different test runs.

  • The nix.buildMachines option is now type-checked. There are no functional changes, however this may require updating some configurations to use correct types for all attributes.

  • The fontconfig module stopped generating config and cache files for fontconfig 2.10.x, the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf now belongs to the latest fontconfig, just like on other Linux distributions, and we will no longer be versioning the config directories.

    Fontconfig 2.10.x was removed from Nixpkgs since it hasn’t been used in any Nixpkgs package for years now.

  • Nginx module nginxModules.fastcgi-cache-purge renamed to official name nginxModules.cache-purge. Nginx module nginxModules.ngx_aws_auth renamed to official name nginxModules.aws-auth.

  • The option defaultPackages was added. It installs the packages perl, rsync and strace for now. They were added unconditionally to systemPackages before, but are not strictly necessary for a minimal NixOS install. You can set it to an empty list to have a more minimal system. Be aware that some functionality might still have an impure dependency on those packages, so things might break.

  • The undervolt option no longer needs to apply its settings every 30s. If they still become undone, open an issue and restore the previous behaviour using undervolt.useTimer.

  • Agda has been heavily reworked.

    • agda.mkDerivation has been heavily changed and is now located at agdaPackages.mkDerivation.

    • New top-level packages agda and agda.withPackages have been added, the second of which sets up agda with access to chosen libraries.

    • All agda libraries now live under agdaPackages.

    • Many broken libraries have been removed.

    See the new documentation for more information.

  • The deepin package set has been removed from nixpkgs. It was a work in progress to package the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), including libraries, tools and applications, and it was still missing a service to launch the desktop environment. It has shown to no longer be a feasible goal due to reasons discussed in issue #94870. The package netease-cloud-music has also been removed, as it depends on libraries from deepin.

  • The opendkim module now uses systemd sandboxing features to limit the exposure of the system towards the opendkim service.

  • Kubernetes has been upgraded to 1.19.1, which also means that the golang version to build it has been bumped to 1.15. This may have consequences for your existing clusters and their certificates. Please consider the release notes for Kubernetes 1.19 carefully before upgrading.

  • For AMD GPUs, Vulkan can now be used by adding amdvlk to hardware.opengl.extraPackages.

  • Similarly, still for AMD GPUs, the ROCm OpenCL stack can now be used by adding rocm-opencl-icd to hardware.opengl.extraPackages.

Contributions

I, Jonathan Ringer, would like to thank the following individuals for their work on nixpkgs. This release could not be done without the hard work of the NixOS community. There were 31282 contributions across 1313 contributors.

  1. 2288 Mario Rodas

  2. 1837 Frederik Rietdijk

  3. 946 Jörg Thalheim

  4. 925 Maximilian Bosch

  5. 687 Jonathan Ringer

  6. 651 Jan Tojnar

  7. 622 Daniël de Kok

  8. 605 WORLDofPEACE

  9. 597 Florian Klink

  10. 528 José Romildo Malaquias

  11. 281 volth

  12. 101 Robert Scott

  13. 86 Tim Steinbach

  14. 76 WORLDofPEACE

  15. 49 Maximilian Bosch

  16. 42 Thomas Tuegel

  17. 37 Doron Behar

  18. 36 Vladimír Čunát

  19. 27 Jonathan Ringer

  20. 27 Maciej Krüger

I, Jonathan Ringer, would also like to personally thank @WORLDofPEACE for their help in mentoring me on the release process. Special thanks also goes to Thomas Tuegel for helping immensely with stabilizing Qt, KDE, and Plasma5; I would also like to thank Robert Scott for his numerous fixes and pull request reviews.

Release 20.03 (“Markhor”, 2020.04/20)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Support is planned until the end of October 2020, handing over to 20.09.

  • Core version changes:

    gcc: 8.3.0 -> 9.2.0

    glibc: 2.27 -> 2.30

    linux: 4.19 -> 5.4

    mesa: 19.1.5 -> 19.3.3

    openssl: 1.0.2u -> 1.1.1d

  • Desktop version changes:

    plasma5: 5.16.5 -> 5.17.5

    kdeApplications: 19.08.2 -> 19.12.3

    gnome3: 3.32 -> 3.34

    pantheon: 5.0 -> 5.1.3

  • Linux kernel is updated to branch 5.4 by default (from 4.19).

  • Grub is updated to 2.04, adding support for booting from F2FS filesystems and Btrfs volumes using zstd compression. Note that some users have been unable to boot after upgrading to 2.04 - for more information, please see this discussion.

  • Postgresql for NixOS service now defaults to v11.

  • The graphical installer image starts the graphical session automatically. Before you’d be greeted by a tty and asked to enter systemctl start display-manager. It is now possible to disable the display-manager from running by selecting the Disable display-manager quirk in the boot menu.

  • GNOME 3 has been upgraded to 3.34. Please take a look at their Release Notes for details.

  • If you enable the Pantheon Desktop Manager via services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon.enable, we now default to also use Pantheon’s newly designed greeter . Contrary to NixOS’s usual update policy, Pantheon will receive updates during the cycle of NixOS 20.03 when backwards compatible.

  • By default zfs pools will now be trimmed on a weekly basis. Trimming is only done on supported devices (i.e. NVME or SSDs) and should improve throughput and lifetime of these devices. It is controlled by the services.zfs.trim.enable varname. The zfs scrub service (services.zfs.autoScrub.enable) and the zfs autosnapshot service (services.zfs.autoSnapshot.enable) are now only enabled if zfs is set in config.boot.initrd.supportedFilesystems or config.boot.supportedFilesystems. These lists will automatically contain zfs as soon as any zfs mountpoint is configured in fileSystems.

  • nixos-option has been rewritten in C++, speeding it up, improving correctness, and adding a -r option which prints all options and their values recursively.

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.default and services.xserver.windowManager.default options were replaced by a single services.xserver.displayManager.defaultSession option to improve support for upstream session files. If you used something like:

    {
      services.xserver.desktopManager.default = "xfce";
      services.xserver.windowManager.default = "icewm";
    }
    

    you should change it to:

    {
      services.xserver.displayManager.defaultSession = "xfce+icewm";
    }
    
  • The testing driver implementation in NixOS is now in Python make-test-python.nix. This was done by Jacek Galowicz (@tfc), and with the collaboration of Julian Stecklina (@blitz) and Jana Traue (@jtraue). All documentation has been updated to use this testing driver, and a vast majority of the 286 tests in NixOS were ported to python driver. In 20.09 the Perl driver implementation, make-test.nix, is slated for removal. This should give users of the NixOS integration framework a transitory period to rewrite their tests to use the Python implementation. Users of the Perl driver will see this warning everytime they use it:

    $ warning: Perl VM tests are deprecated and will be removed for 20.09.
    Please update your tests to use the python test driver.
    See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/71684 for details.
    

    API compatibility is planned to be kept for at least the next release with the perl driver.

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • The kubernetes kube-proxy now supports a new hostname configuration services.kubernetes.proxy.hostname which has to be set if the hostname of the node should be non default.

  • UPower’s configuration is now managed by NixOS and can be customized via services.upower.

  • To use Geary you should enable programs.geary.enable instead of just adding it to environment.systemPackages. It was created so Geary could function properly outside of GNOME.

  • ./config/console.nix

  • ./hardware/brillo.nix

  • ./hardware/tuxedo-keyboard.nix

  • ./programs/bandwhich.nix

  • ./programs/bash-my-aws.nix

  • ./programs/liboping.nix

  • ./programs/traceroute.nix

  • ./services/backup/sanoid.nix

  • ./services/backup/syncoid.nix

  • ./services/backup/zfs-replication.nix

  • ./services/continuous-integration/buildkite-agents.nix

  • ./services/databases/victoriametrics.nix

  • ./services/desktops/gnome3/gnome-initial-setup.nix

  • ./services/desktops/neard.nix

  • ./services/games/openarena.nix

  • ./services/hardware/fancontrol.nix

  • ./services/mail/sympa.nix

  • ./services/misc/freeswitch.nix

  • ./services/misc/mame.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/do-agent.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/prometheus/xmpp-alerts.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/orangefs/server.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/orangefs/client.nix

  • ./services/networking/3proxy.nix

  • ./services/networking/corerad.nix

  • ./services/networking/go-shadowsocks2.nix

  • ./services/networking/ntp/openntpd.nix

  • ./services/networking/shorewall.nix

  • ./services/networking/shorewall6.nix

  • ./services/networking/spacecookie.nix

  • ./services/networking/trickster.nix

  • ./services/networking/v2ray.nix

  • ./services/networking/xandikos.nix

  • ./services/networking/yggdrasil.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/dokuwiki.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/gotify-server.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/grocy.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/ihatemoney

  • ./services/web-apps/moinmoin.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/trac.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/trilium.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/shiori.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/ttyd.nix

  • ./services/x11/picom.nix

  • ./services/x11/hardware/digimend.nix

  • ./services/x11/imwheel.nix

  • ./virtualisation/cri-o.nix

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • The dhcpcd package does not request IPv4 addresses for tap and bridge interfaces anymore by default. In order to still get an address on a bridge interface, one has to disable networking.useDHCP and explicitly enable networking.interfaces.<name>.useDHCP on every interface, that should get an address via DHCP. This way, dhcpcd is configured in an explicit way about which interface to run on.

  • GnuPG is now built without support for a graphical passphrase entry by default. Please enable the gpg-agent user service via the NixOS option programs.gnupg.agent.enable. Note that upstream recommends using gpg-agent and will spawn a gpg-agent on the first invocation of GnuPG anyway.

  • The dynamicHosts option has been removed from the NetworkManager module. Allowing (multiple) regular users to override host entries affecting the whole system opens up a huge attack vector. There seem to be very rare cases where this might be useful. Consider setting system-wide host entries using networking.hosts, provide them via the DNS server in your network, or use environment.etc to add a file into /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d reconfiguring hostsdir.

  • The 99-main.network file was removed. Matching all network interfaces caused many breakages, see #18962 and #71106.

    We already don’t support the global networking.useDHCP, networking.defaultGateway and networking.defaultGateway6 options if networking.useNetworkd is enabled, but direct users to configure the per-device networking.interfaces.<name>… options.

  • The stdenv now runs all bash with set -u, to catch the use of undefined variables. Before, it itself used set -u but was careful to unset it so other packages’ code ran as before. Now, all bash code is held to the same high standard, and the rather complex stateful manipulation of the options can be discarded.

  • The SLIM Display Manager has been removed, as it has been unmaintained since 2013. Consider migrating to a different display manager such as LightDM (current default in NixOS), SDDM, GDM, or using the startx module which uses Xinitrc.

  • The Way Cooler wayland compositor has been removed, as the project has been officially canceled. There are no more way-cooler attribute and programs.way-cooler options.

  • The BEAM package set has been deleted. You will only find there the different interpreters. You should now use the different build tools coming with the languages with sandbox mode disabled.

  • There is now only one Xfce package-set and module. This means that attributes xfce4-14 and xfceUnstable all now point to the latest Xfce 4.14 packages. And in the future NixOS releases will be the latest released version of Xfce available at the time of the release’s development (if viable).

  • The phpfpm module now sets PrivateTmp=true in its systemd units for better process isolation. If you rely on /tmp being shared with other services, explicitly override this by setting serviceConfig.PrivateTmp to false for each phpfpm unit.

  • KDE’s old multimedia framework Phonon no longer supports Qt 4. For that reason, Plasma desktop also does not have enableQt4Support option any more.

  • The BeeGFS module has been removed.

  • The osquery module has been removed.

  • Going forward, ~/bin in the users home directory will no longer be in PATH by default. If you depend on this you should set the option environment.homeBinInPath to true. The aforementioned option was added this release.

  • The buildRustCrate infrastructure now produces lib outputs in addition to the out output. This has led to drastically reduced closure sizes for some rust crates since development dependencies are now in the lib output.

  • Pango was upgraded to 1.44, which no longer uses freetype for font loading. This means that type1 and bitmap fonts are no longer supported in applications relying on Pango for font rendering (notably, GTK application). See upstream issue for more information.

  • The roundcube module has been hardened.

    • The password of the database is not written world readable in the store any more. If database.host is set to localhost, then a unix user of the same name as the database will be created and PostreSQL peer authentication will be used, removing the need for a password. Otherwise, a password is still needed and can be provided with the new option database.passwordFile, which should be set to the path of a file containing the password and readable by the user nginx only. The database.password option is insecure and deprecated. Usage of this option will print a warning.

    • A random des_key is set by default in the configuration of roundcube, instead of using the hardcoded and insecure default. To ensure a clean migration, all users will be logged out when you upgrade to this release.

  • The packages openobex and obexftp are no longer installed when enabling Bluetooth via hardware.bluetooth.enable.

  • The dump1090 derivation has been changed to use FlightAware’s dump1090 as its upstream. However, this version does not have an internal webserver anymore. The assets in the share/dump1090 directory of the derivation can be used in conjunction with an external webserver to replace this functionality.

  • The fourStore and fourStoreEndpoint modules have been removed.

  • Polkit no longer has the user of uid 0 (root) as an admin identity. We now follow the upstream default of only having every member of the wheel group admin privileged. Before it was root and members of wheel. The positive outcome of this is pkexec GUI popups or terminal prompts will no longer require the user to choose between two essentially equivalent choices (whether to perform the action as themselves with wheel permissions, or as the root user).

  • NixOS containers no longer build NixOS manual by default. This saves evaluation time, especially if there are many declarative containers defined. Note that this is already done when <nixos/modules/profiles/minimal.nix> module is included in container config.

  • The kresd services deprecates the interfaces option in favor of the listenPlain option which requires full systemd.socket compatible declaration which always include a port.

  • Virtual console options have been reorganized and can be found under a single top-level attribute: console. The full set of changes is as follows:

  • The awstats module has been rewritten to serve stats via static html pages, updated on a timer, over nginx, instead of dynamic cgi pages over apache.

    Minor changes will be required to migrate existing configurations. Details of the required changes can seen by looking through the awstats module.

  • The httpd module no longer provides options to support serving web content without defining a virtual host. As a result of this the services.httpd.logPerVirtualHost option now defaults to true instead of false. Please update your configuration to make use of services.httpd.virtualHosts.

    The services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name> option has changed type from a list of submodules to an attribute set of submodules, better matching services.nginx.virtualHosts.<name>.

    This change comes with the addition of the following options which mimic the functionality of their nginx counterparts: services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.addSSL, services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.forceSSL, services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.onlySSL, services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.enableACME, services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.acmeRoot, and services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.useACMEHost.

  • For NixOS configuration options, the loaOf type has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. In nixpkgs, options of this type will be changed to attrsOf instead. If you were using one of these in your configuration, you will see a warning suggesting what changes will be required.

    For example, users.users is a loaOf option that is commonly used as follows:

    {
      users.users =
        [ { name = "me";
            description = "My personal user.";
            isNormalUser = true;
          }
        ];
    }
    

    This should be rewritten by removing the list and using the value of name as the name of the attribute set:

    {
      users.users.me =
        { description = "My personal user.";
          isNormalUser = true;
        };
    }
    

    For more information on this change have look at these links: issue #1800, PR #63103.

  • For NixOS modules, the types types.submodule and types.submoduleWith now support paths as allowed values, similar to how imports supports paths. Because of this, if you have a module that defines an option of type either (submodule ...) path, it will break since a path is now treated as the first type instead of the second. To fix this, change the type to either path (submodule ...).

  • The Buildkite Agent module and corresponding packages have been updated to 3.x, and to support multiple instances of the agent running at the same time. This means you will have to rename services.buildkite-agent to services.buildkite-agents.<name>. Furthermore, the following options have been changed:

    • services.buildkite-agent.meta-data has been renamed to services.buildkite-agents.<name>.tags, to match upstreams naming for 3.x. Its type has also changed - it now accepts an attrset of strings.

    • Theservices.buildkite-agent.openssh.publicKeyPath option has been removed, as it’s not necessary to deploy public keys to clone private repositories.

    • services.buildkite-agent.openssh.privateKeyPath has been renamed to buildkite-agents.<name>.privateSshKeyPath, as the whole openssh now only contained that single option.

    • services.buildkite-agents.<name>.shell has been introduced, allowing to specify a custom shell to be used.

  • The citrix_workspace_19_3_0 package has been removed as it will be EOLed within the lifespan of 20.03. For further information, please refer to the support and maintenance information from upstream.

  • The gcc5 and gfortran5 packages have been removed.

  • The services.xserver.displayManager.auto module has been removed. It was only intended for use in internal NixOS tests, and gave the false impression of it being a special display manager when it’s actually LightDM. Please use the services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.autoLogin options instead, or any other display manager in NixOS as they all support auto-login. If you used this module specifically because it permitted root auto-login you can override the lightdm-autologin pam module like:

    {
      security.pam.services.lightdm-autologin.text = lib.mkForce ''
          auth     requisite pam_nologin.so
          auth     required  pam_succeed_if.so quiet
          auth     required  pam_permit.so
    
          account  include   lightdm
    
          password include   lightdm
    
          session  include   lightdm
      '';
    }
    

    The difference is the:

    auth required pam_succeed_if.so quiet
    

    line, where default it’s:

     auth required pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 1000 quiet
    

    not permitting users with uid’s below 1000 (like root). All other display managers in NixOS are configured like this.

  • There have been lots of improvements to the Mailman module. As a result,

    • The services.mailman.hyperkittyBaseUrl option has been renamed to services.mailman.hyperkitty.baseUrl.

    • The services.mailman.hyperkittyApiKey option has been removed. This is because having an option for the Hyperkitty API key meant that the API key would be stored in the world-readable Nix store, which was a security vulnerability. A new Hyperkitty API key will be generated the first time the new Hyperkitty service is run, and it will then be persisted outside of the Nix store. To continue using Hyperkitty, you must set services.mailman.hyperkitty.enable to true.

    • Additionally, some Postfix configuration must now be set manually instead of automatically by the Mailman module:

      {
        services.postfix.relayDomains = [ "hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/postfix_domains" ];
        services.postfix.config.transport_maps = [ "hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/postfix_lmtp" ];
        services.postfix.config.local_recipient_maps = [ "hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/postfix_lmtp" ];
      }
      

      This is because some users may want to include other values in these lists as well, and this was not possible if they were set automatically by the Mailman module. It would not have been possible to just concatenate values from multiple modules each setting the values they needed, because the order of elements in the list is significant.

  • The LLVM versions 3.5, 3.9 and 4 (including the corresponding CLang versions) have been dropped.

  • The networking.interfaces.*.preferTempAddress option has been replaced by networking.interfaces.*.tempAddress. The new option allows better control of the IPv6 temporary addresses, including completely disabling them for interfaces where they are not needed.

  • Rspamd was updated to version 2.2. Read the upstream migration notes carefully. Please be especially aware that some modules were removed and the default Bayes backend is now Redis.

  • The *psu versions of oraclejdk8 have been removed as they aren’t provided by upstream anymore.

  • The services.dnscrypt-proxy module has been removed as it used the deprecated version of dnscrypt-proxy. We’ve added services.dnscrypt-proxy2.enable to use the supported version. This module supports configuration via the Nix attribute set services.dnscrypt-proxy2.settings, or by passing a TOML configuration file via services.dnscrypt-proxy2.configFile.

    {
      # Example configuration:
      services.dnscrypt-proxy2.enable = true;
      services.dnscrypt-proxy2.settings = {
        listen_addresses = [ "127.0.0.1:43" ];
        sources.public-resolvers = {
          urls = [ "https://download.dnscrypt.info/resolvers-list/v2/public-resolvers.md" ];
          cache_file = "public-resolvers.md";
          minisign_key = "RWQf6LRCGA9i53mlYecO4IzT51TGPpvWucNSCh1CBM0QTaLn73Y7GFO3";
          refresh_delay = 72;
        };
      };
    
      services.dnsmasq.enable = true;
      services.dnsmasq.servers = [ "127.0.0.1#43" ];
    }
    
  • qesteidutil has been deprecated in favor of qdigidoc.

  • sqldeveloper_18 has been removed as it’s not maintained anymore, sqldeveloper has been updated to version 19.4. Please note that this means that this means that the oraclejdk is now required. For further information please read the release notes.

  • Haskell env and shellFor dev shell environments now organize dependencies the same way as regular builds. In particular, rather than receiving all the different lists of dependencies mashed together as one big list, and then partitioning into Haskell and non-Hakell dependencies, they work from the original many different dependency parameters and don’t need to algorithmically partition anything.

    This means that if you incorrectly categorize a dependency, e.g. non-Haskell library dependency as a buildDepends or run-time Haskell dependency as a setupDepends, whereas things would have worked before they may not work now.

  • The gcc-snapshot-package has been removed. It’s marked as broken for >2 years and used to point to a fairly old snapshot from the gcc7-branch.

  • The nixos-build-vms8 -script now uses the python test-driver.

  • The riot-web package now accepts configuration overrides as an attribute set instead of a string. A formerly used JSON configuration can be converted to an attribute set with builtins.fromJSON.

    The new default configuration also disables automatic guest account registration and analytics to improve privacy. The previous behavior can be restored by setting config.riot-web.conf = { disable_guests = false; piwik = true; }.

  • Stand-alone usage of Upower now requires services.upower.enable instead of just installing into environment.systemPackages.

  • nextcloud has been updated to v18.0.2. This means that users from NixOS 19.09 can’t upgrade directly since you can only move one version forward and 19.09 uses v16.0.8.

    To provide a safe upgrade-path and to circumvent similar issues in the future, the following measures were taken:

    • The pkgs.nextcloud-attribute has been removed and replaced with versioned attributes (currently pkgs.nextcloud17 and pkgs.nextcloud18). With this change major-releases can be backported without breaking stuff and to make upgrade-paths easier.

    • Existing setups will be detected using system.stateVersion: by default, nextcloud17 will be used, but will raise a warning which notes that after that deploy it’s recommended to update to the latest stable version (nextcloud18) by declaring the newly introduced setting services.nextcloud.package.

    • Users with an overlay (e.g. to use nextcloud at version v18 on 19.09) will get an evaluation error by default. This is done to ensure that our package-option doesn’t select an older version by accident. It’s recommended to use pkgs.nextcloud18 or to set package to pkgs.nextcloud explicitly.

    Warning

    Please note that if you’re coming from 19.03 or older, you have to manually upgrade to 19.09 first to upgrade your server to Nextcloud v16.

  • Hydra has gained a massive performance improvement due to some database schema changes by adding several IDs and better indexing. However, it’s necessary to upgrade Hydra in multiple steps:

    • At first, an older version of Hydra needs to be deployed which adds those (nullable) columns. When having set stateVersion to a value older than 20.03, this package will be selected by default from the module when upgrading. Otherwise, the package can be deployed using the following config:

      { pkgs, ... }: {
        services.hydra.package = pkgs.hydra-migration;
      }
      
  • Automatically fill the newly added ID columns on the server by running the following command:

    $ hydra-backfill-ids
    

    Warning

    Please note that this process can take a while depending on your database-size!

  • Deploy a newer version of Hydra to activate the DB optimizations. This can be done by using hydra-unstable. This package already includes flake-support and is therefore compiled against pkgs.nixFlakes.

    Warning

    If your stateVersion is set to 20.03 or greater, hydra-unstable will be used automatically! This will break your setup if you didn’t run the migration.

    Please note that Hydra is currently not available with nixStable as this doesn’t compile anymore.

    Warning

    pkgs.hydra has been removed to ensure a graceful database-migration using the dedicated package-attributes. If you still have pkgs.hydra defined in e.g. an overlay, an assertion error will be thrown. To circumvent this, you need to set services.hydra.package to pkgs.hydra explicitly and make sure you know what you’re doing!

  • The TokuDB storage engine will be disabled in mariadb 10.5. It is recommended to switch to RocksDB. See also TokuDB.

Other Notable Changes

  • SD images are now compressed by default using bzip2.

  • The nginx web server previously started its master process as root privileged, then ran worker processes as a less privileged identity user (the nginx user). This was changed to start all of nginx as a less privileged user (defined by services.nginx.user and services.nginx.group). As a consequence, all files that are needed for nginx to run (included configuration fragments, SSL certificates and keys, etc.) must now be readable by this less privileged user/group.

    To continue to use the old approach, you can configure:

    {
      services.nginx.appendConfig = let cfg = config.services.nginx; in ''user ${cfg.user} ${cfg.group};'';
      systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.User = lib.mkForce "root";
    }
    
  • OpenSSH has been upgraded from 7.9 to 8.1, improving security and adding features but with potential incompatibilities. Consult the release announcement for more information.

  • PRETTY_NAME in /etc/os-release now uses the short rather than full version string.

  • The ACME module has switched from simp-le to lego which allows us to support DNS-01 challenges and wildcard certificates. The following options have been added: security.acme.acceptTerms, security.acme.certs.<name>.dnsProvider, security.acme.certs.<name>.credentialsFile, security.acme.certs.<name>.dnsPropagationCheck. As well as this, the options security.acme.acceptTerms and either security.acme.email or security.acme.certs.<name>.email must be set in order to use the ACME module. Certificates will be regenerated on activation, no account or certificate will be migrated from simp-le. In particular private keys will not be preserved. However, the credentials for simp-le are preserved and thus it is possible to roll back to previous versions without breaking certificate generation. Note also that in contrary to simp-le a new private key is recreated at each renewal by default, which can have consequences if you embed your public key in apps.

  • It is now possible to unlock LUKS-Encrypted file systems using a FIDO2 token via boot.initrd.luks.fido2Support.

  • Predictably named network interfaces get renamed in stage-1. This means that it is possible to use the proper interface name for e.g. Dropbear setups.

    For further reference, please read #68953 or the corresponding discourse thread.

  • The matrix-synapse-package has been updated to v1.11.1. Due to stricter requirements for database configuration when using postgresql, the automated database setup of the module has been removed to avoid any further edge-cases.

    matrix-synapse expects postgresql-databases to have the options LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE set to 'C' which basically instructs postgresql to ignore any locale-based preferences.

    Depending on your setup, you need to incorporate one of the following changes in your setup to upgrade to 20.03:

    • If you use sqlite3 you don’t need to do anything.

    • If you use postgresql on a different server, you don’t need to change anything as well since this module was never designed to configure remote databases.

    • If you use postgresql and configured your synapse initially on 19.09 or older, you need to enable postgresql-support explicitly:

      { ... }: {
        services.matrix-synapse = {
          enable = true;
          /* and all the other config you've defined here */
        };
        services.postgresql.enable = true;
      }
      
  • If you deploy a fresh matrix-synapse, you need to configure the database yourself (e.g. by using the services.postgresql.initialScript option). An example for this can be found in the documentation of the Matrix module.

  • If you initially deployed your matrix-synapse on nixos-unstable after the 19.09-release, your database is misconfigured due to a regression in NixOS. For now, matrix-synapse will startup with a warning, but it’s recommended to reconfigure the database to set the values LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE to 'C'.

  • The systemd.network.links option is now respected even when systemd-networkd is disabled. This mirrors the behaviour of systemd - It’s udev that parses .link files, not systemd-networkd.

  • mongodb has been updated to version 3.4.24.

    Warning

    Please note that mongodb has been relicensed under their own sspl-license. Since it’s not entirely free and not OSI-approved, it’s listed as non-free. This means that Hydra doesn’t provide prebuilt mongodb-packages and needs to be built locally.

Release 19.09 (“Loris”, 2019/10/09)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • End of support is planned for end of April 2020, handing over to 20.03.

  • Nix has been updated to 2.3; see its release notes.

  • Core version changes:

    systemd: 239 -> 243

    gcc: 7 -> 8

    glibc: 2.27 (unchanged)

    linux: 4.19 LTS (unchanged)

    openssl: 1.0 -> 1.1

  • Desktop version changes:

    plasma5: 5.14 -> 5.16

    gnome3: 3.30 -> 3.32

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 7.3, updated from 7.2.

  • PHP 7.1 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 19.09 release.

  • The binfmt module is now easier to use. Additional systems can be added through boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems. For instance, boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "wasm32-wasi" "x86_64-windows" "aarch64-linux" ]; will set up binfmt interpreters for each of those listed systems.

  • The installer now uses a less privileged nixos user whereas before we logged in as root. To gain root privileges use sudo -i without a password.

  • We’ve updated to Xfce 4.14, which brings a new module services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce4-14. If you’d like to upgrade, please switch from the services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce module as it will be deprecated in a future release. They’re incompatibilities with the current Xfce module; it doesn’t support thunarPlugins and it isn’t recommended to use services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce and services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce4-14 simultaneously or to downgrade from Xfce 4.14 after upgrading.

  • The GNOME 3 desktop manager module sports an interface to enable/disable core services, applications, and optional GNOME packages like games.

    • services.gnome3.core-os-services.enable

    • services.gnome3.core-shell.enable

    • services.gnome3.core-utilities.enable

    • services.gnome3.games.enable

    With these options we hope to give users finer grained control over their systems. Prior to this change you’d either have to manually disable options or use environment.gnome3.excludePackages which only excluded the optional applications. environment.gnome3.excludePackages is now unguarded, it can exclude any package installed with environment.systemPackages in the GNOME 3 module.

  • Orthogonal to the previous changes to the GNOME 3 desktop manager module, we’ve updated all default services and applications to match as close as possible to a default reference GNOME 3 experience.

    The following changes were enacted in services.gnome3.core-utilities.enable

    • accerciser

    • dconf-editor

    • evolution

    • gnome-documents

    • gnome-nettool

    • gnome-power-manager

    • gnome-todo

    • gnome-tweaks

    • gnome-usage

    • gucharmap

    • nautilus-sendto

    • vinagre

    • cheese

    • geary

    The following changes were enacted in services.gnome3.core-shell.enable

    • gnome-color-manager

    • orca

    • services.avahi.enable

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • ./programs/dwm-status.nix

  • The new hardware.printers module allows to declaratively configure CUPS printers via the ensurePrinters and ensureDefaultPrinter options. ensurePrinters will never delete existing printers, but will make sure that the given printers are configured as declared.

  • There is a new services.system-config-printer.enable and programs.system-config-printer.enable module for the program of the same name. If you previously had system-config-printer enabled through some other means you should migrate to using one of these modules.

    • services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5

    • services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome3

    • services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon

    • services.xserver.desktopManager.mate Note Mate uses programs.system-config-printer as it doesn’t use it as a service, but its graphical interface directly.

  • services.blueman.enable has been added. If you previously had blueman installed via environment.systemPackages please migrate to using the NixOS module, as this would result in an insufficiently configured blueman.

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • Buildbot no longer supports Python 2, as support was dropped upstream in version 2.0.0. Configurations may need to be modified to make them compatible with Python 3.

  • PostgreSQL now uses /run/postgresql as its socket directory instead of /tmp. So if you run an application like eg. Nextcloud, where you need to use the Unix socket path as the database host name, you need to change it accordingly.

  • PostgreSQL 9.4 is scheduled EOL during the 19.09 life cycle and has been removed.

  • The options services.prometheus.alertmanager.user and services.prometheus.alertmanager.group have been removed because the alertmanager service is now using systemd’s DynamicUser mechanism which obviates these options.

  • The NetworkManager systemd unit was renamed back from network-manager.service to NetworkManager.service for better compatibility with other applications expecting this name. The same applies to ModemManager where modem-manager.service is now called ModemManager.service again.

  • The services.nzbget.configFile and services.nzbget.openFirewall options were removed as they are managed internally by the nzbget. The services.nzbget.dataDir option hadn’t actually been used by the module for some time and so was removed as cleanup.

  • The services.mysql.pidDir option was removed, as it was only used by the wordpress apache-httpd service to wait for mysql to have started up. This can be accomplished by either describing a dependency on mysql.service (preferred) or waiting for the (hardcoded) /run/mysqld/mysql.sock file to appear.

  • The services.emby.enable module has been removed, see services.jellyfin.enable instead for a free software fork of Emby. See the Jellyfin documentation: Migrating from Emby to Jellyfin

  • IPv6 Privacy Extensions are now enabled by default for undeclared interfaces. The previous behaviour was quite misleading — even though the default value for networking.interfaces.*.preferTempAddress was true, undeclared interfaces would not prefer temporary addresses. Now, interfaces not mentioned in the config will prefer temporary addresses. EUI64 addresses can still be set as preferred by explicitly setting the option to false for the interface in question.

  • Since Bittorrent Sync was superseded by Resilio Sync in 2016, the bittorrentSync, bittorrentSync14, and bittorrentSync16 packages have been removed in favor of resilio-sync.

    The corresponding module, services.btsync has been replaced by the services.resilio module.

  • The httpd service no longer attempts to start the postgresql service. If you have come to depend on this behaviour then you can preserve the behavior with the following configuration: systemd.services.httpd.after = [ "postgresql.service" ];

    The option services.httpd.extraSubservices has been marked as deprecated. You may still use this feature, but it will be removed in a future release of NixOS. You are encouraged to convert any httpd subservices you may have written to a full NixOS module.

    Most of the httpd subservices packaged with NixOS have been replaced with full NixOS modules including LimeSurvey, WordPress, and Zabbix. These modules can be enabled using the services.limesurvey.enable, services.mediawiki.enable, services.wordpress.enable, and services.zabbixWeb.enable options.

  • The option systemd.network.networks.<name>.routes.*.routeConfig.GatewayOnlink was renamed to systemd.network.networks.<name>.routes.*.routeConfig.GatewayOnLink (capital L). This follows upstreams renaming of the setting.

  • As of this release the NixOps feature autoLuks is deprecated. It no longer works with our systemd version without manual intervention.

    Whenever the usage of the module is detected the evaluation will fail with a message explaining why and how to deal with the situation.

    A new knob named nixops.enableDeprecatedAutoLuks has been introduced to disable the eval failure and to acknowledge the notice was received and read. If you plan on using the feature please note that it might break with subsequent updates.

    Make sure you set the _netdev option for each of the file systems referring to block devices provided by the autoLuks module. Not doing this might render the system in a state where it doesn’t boot anymore.

    If you are actively using the autoLuks module please let us know in issue #62211.

  • The setopt declarations will be evaluated at the end of /etc/zshrc, so any code in programs.zsh.interactiveShellInit, programs.zsh.loginShellInit and programs.zsh.promptInit may break if it relies on those options being set.

  • The prometheus-nginx-exporter package now uses the official exporter provided by NGINX Inc. Its metrics are differently structured and are incompatible to the old ones. For information about the metrics, have a look at the official repo.

  • The shibboleth-sp package has been updated to version 3. It is largely backward compatible, for further information refer to the release notes and upgrade guide.

    Nodejs 8 is scheduled EOL under the lifetime of 19.09 and has been dropped.

  • By default, prometheus exporters are now run with DynamicUser enabled. Exporters that need a real user, now run under a separate user and group which follow the pattern <exporter-name>-exporter, instead of the previous default nobody and nogroup. Only some exporters are affected by the latter, namely the exporters dovecot, node, postfix and varnish.

  • The ibus-qt package is not installed by default anymore when i18n.inputMethod.enabled is set to ibus. If IBus support in Qt 4.x applications is required, add the ibus-qt package to your environment.systemPackages manually.

  • The CUPS Printing service now uses socket-based activation by default, only starting when needed. The previous behavior can be restored by setting services.cups.startWhenNeeded to false.

  • The services.systemhealth module has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  • The services.mantisbt module has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  • Squid 3 has been removed and the squid derivation now refers to Squid 4.

  • The services.pdns-recursor.extraConfig option has been replaced by services.pdns-recursor.settings. The new option allows setting extra configuration while being better type-checked and mergeable.

  • No service depends on keys.target anymore which is a systemd target that indicates if all NixOps keys were successfully uploaded. Instead, <key-name>-key.service should be used to define a dependency of a key in a service. The full issue behind the keys.target dependency is described at NixOS/nixpkgs#67265.

    The following services are affected by this:

  • The security.acme.directory option has been replaced by a read-only security.acme.certs.<cert>.directory option for each certificate you define. This will be a subdirectory of /var/lib/acme. You can use this read-only option to figure out where the certificates are stored for a specific certificate. For example, the services.nginx.virtualhosts.<name>.enableACME option will use this directory option to find the certs for the virtual host.

    security.acme.preDelay and security.acme.activationDelay options have been removed. To execute a service before certificates are provisioned or renewed add a RequiredBy=acme-${cert}.service to any service.

    Furthermore, the acme module will not automatically add a dependency on lighttpd.service anymore. If you are using certificates provided by letsencrypt for lighttpd, then you should depend on the certificate service acme-${cert}.service> manually.

    For nginx, the dependencies are still automatically managed when services.nginx.virtualhosts.<name>.enableACME is enabled just like before. What changed is that nginx now directly depends on the specific certificates that it needs, instead of depending on the catch-all acme-certificates.target. This target unit was also removed from the codebase. This will mean nginx will no longer depend on certificates it isn’t explicitly managing and fixes a bug with certificate renewal ordering racing with nginx restarting which could lead to nginx getting in a broken state as described at NixOS/nixpkgs#60180.

  • The old deprecated emacs package sets have been dropped. What used to be called emacsPackagesNg is now called emacsPackages.

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.xterm is now disabled by default if stateVersion is 19.09 or higher. Previously the xterm desktopManager was enabled when xserver was enabled, but it isn’t useful for all people so it didn’t make sense to have any desktopManager enabled default.

  • The WeeChat plugin pkgs.weechatScripts.weechat-xmpp has been removed as it doesn’t receive any updates from upstream and depends on outdated Python2-based modules.

  • Old unsupported versions (logstash5, kibana5, filebeat5, heartbeat5, metricbeat5, packetbeat5) of the ELK-stack and Elastic beats have been removed.

  • For NixOS 19.03, both Prometheus 1 and 2 were available to allow for a seamless transition from version 1 to 2 with existing setups. Because Prometheus 1 is no longer developed, it was removed. Prometheus 2 is now configured with services.prometheus.

  • Citrix Receiver (citrix_receiver) has been dropped in favor of Citrix Workspace (citrix_workspace).

  • The services.gitlab module has had its literal secret options (services.gitlab.smtp.password, services.gitlab.databasePassword, services.gitlab.initialRootPassword, services.gitlab.secrets.secret, services.gitlab.secrets.db, services.gitlab.secrets.otp and services.gitlab.secrets.jws) replaced by file-based versions (services.gitlab.smtp.passwordFile, services.gitlab.databasePasswordFile, services.gitlab.initialRootPasswordFile, services.gitlab.secrets.secretFile, services.gitlab.secrets.dbFile, services.gitlab.secrets.otpFile and services.gitlab.secrets.jwsFile). This was done so that secrets aren’t stored in the world-readable nix store, but means that for each option you’ll have to create a file with the same exact string, add “File” to the end of the option name, and change the definition to a string pointing to the corresponding file; e.g. services.gitlab.databasePassword = "supersecurepassword" becomes services.gitlab.databasePasswordFile = "/path/to/secret_file" where the file secret_file contains the string supersecurepassword.

    The state path (services.gitlab.statePath) now has the following restriction: no parent directory can be owned by any other user than root or the user specified in services.gitlab.user; i.e. if services.gitlab.statePath is set to /var/lib/gitlab/state, gitlab and all parent directories must be owned by either root or the user specified in services.gitlab.user.

  • The networking.useDHCP option is unsupported in combination with networking.useNetworkd in anticipation of defaulting to it. It has to be set to false and enabled per interface with networking.interfaces.<name>.useDHCP = true;

  • The Twitter client corebird has been dropped as it is discontinued and does not work against the new Twitter API. Please use the fork cawbird instead which has been adapted to the API changes and is still maintained.

  • The nodejs-11_x package has been removed as it’s EOLed by upstream.

  • Because of the systemd upgrade, systemd-timesyncd will no longer work if system.stateVersion is not set correctly. When upgrading from NixOS 19.03, please make sure that system.stateVersion is set to "19.03", or lower if the installation dates back to an earlier version of NixOS.

  • Due to the short lifetime of non-LTS kernel releases package attributes like linux_5_1, linux_5_2 and linux_5_3 have been removed to discourage dependence on specific non-LTS kernel versions in stable NixOS releases. Going forward, versioned attributes like linux_4_9 will exist for LTS versions only. Please use linux_latest or linux_testing if you depend on non-LTS releases. Keep in mind that linux_latest and linux_testing will change versions under the hood during the lifetime of a stable release and might include breaking changes.

  • Because of the systemd upgrade, some network interfaces might change their name. For details see upstream docs or our ticket.

Other Notable Changes

  • The documentation module gained an option named documentation.nixos.includeAllModules which makes the generated configuration.nix 5 manual page include all options from all NixOS modules included in a given configuration.nix configuration file. Currently, it is set to false by default as enabling it frequently prevents evaluation. But the plan is to eventually have it set to true by default. Please set it to true now in your configuration.nix and fix all the bugs it uncovers.

  • The vlc package gained support for Chromecast streaming, enabled by default. TCP port 8010 must be open for it to work, so something like networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 8010 ]; may be required in your configuration. Also consider enabling Accelerated Video Playback for better transcoding performance.

  • The following changes apply if the stateVersion is changed to 19.09 or higher. For stateVersion = "19.03" or lower the old behavior is preserved.

    • solr.package defaults to pkgs.solr_8.

  • The hunspellDicts.fr-any dictionary now ships with fr_FR.{aff,dic} which is linked to fr-toutesvariantes.{aff,dic}.

  • The mysql service now runs as mysql user. Previously, systemd did execute it as root, and mysql dropped privileges itself. This includes ExecStartPre= and ExecStartPost= phases. To accomplish that, runtime and data directory setup was delegated to RuntimeDirectory and tmpfiles.

  • With the upgrade to systemd version 242 the systemd-timesyncd service is no longer using DynamicUser=yes. In order for the upgrade to work we rely on an activation script to move the state from the old to the new directory. The older directory (prior 19.09) was /var/lib/private/systemd/timesync.

    As long as the system.config.stateVersion is below 19.09 the state folder will migrated to its proper location (/var/lib/systemd/timesync), if required.

  • The package avahi is now built to look up service definitions from /etc/avahi/services instead of its output directory in the nix store. Accordingly the module avahi now supports custom service definitions via services.avahi.extraServiceFiles, which are then placed in the aforementioned directory. See avahi.service5 for more information on custom service definitions.

  • Since version 0.1.19, cargo-vendor honors package includes that are specified in the Cargo.toml file of Rust crates. rustPlatform.buildRustPackage uses cargo-vendor to collect and build dependent crates. Since this change in cargo-vendor changes the set of vendored files for most Rust packages, the hash that use used to verify the dependencies, cargoSha256, also changes.

    The cargoSha256 hashes of all in-tree derivations that use buildRustPackage have been updated to reflect this change. However, third-party derivations that use buildRustPackage may have to be updated as well.

  • The consul package was upgraded past version 1.5, so its deprecated legacy UI is no longer available.

  • The default resample-method for PulseAudio has been changed from the upstream default speex-float-1 to speex-float-5. Be aware that low-powered ARM-based and MIPS-based boards will struggle with this so you’ll need to set hardware.pulseaudio.daemon.config.resample-method back to speex-float-1.

  • The phabricator package and associated httpd.extraSubservice, as well as the phd service have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  • The mercurial httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  • The trac httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs because it was unmaintained.

  • The foswiki package and associated httpd.extraSubservice have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  • The tomcat-connector httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs.

  • It’s now possible to change configuration in services.nextcloud after the initial deploy since all config parameters are persisted in an additional config file generated by the module. Previously core configuration like database parameters were set using their imperative installer after creating /var/lib/nextcloud.

  • There exists now lib.forEach, which is like map, but with arguments flipped. When mapping function body spans many lines (or has nested maps), it is often hard to follow which list is modified.

    Previous solution to this problem was either to use lib.flip map idiom or extract that anonymous mapping function to a named one. Both can still be used but lib.forEach is preferred over lib.flip map.

    The /etc/sysctl.d/nixos.conf file containing all the options set via boot.kernel.sysctl was moved to /etc/sysctl.d/60-nixos.conf, as sysctl.d5 recommends prefixing all filenames in /etc/sysctl.d with a two-digit number and a dash to simplify the ordering of the files.

  • We now install the sysctl snippets shipped with systemd.

    • Loose reverse path filtering

    • Source route filtering

    • fq_codel as a packet scheduler (this helps to fight bufferbloat)

    This also configures the kernel to pass core dumps to systemd-coredump, and restricts the SysRq key combinations to the sync command only. These sysctl snippets can be found in /etc/sysctl.d/50-*.conf, and overridden via boot.kernel.sysctl (which will place the parameters in /etc/sysctl.d/60-nixos.conf).

  • Core dumps are now processed by systemd-coredump by default. systemd-coredump behaviour can still be modified via systemd.coredump.extraConfig. To stick to the old behaviour (having the kernel dump to a file called core in the working directory), without piping it through systemd-coredump, set systemd.coredump.enable to false.

  • systemd.packages option now also supports generators and shutdown scripts. Old systemd.generator-packages option has been removed.

  • The rmilter package was removed with associated module and options due deprecation by upstream developer. Use rspamd in proxy mode instead.

  • systemd cgroup accounting via the systemd.enableCgroupAccounting option is now enabled by default. It now also enables the more recent Block IO and IP accounting features.

  • We no longer enable custom font rendering settings with fonts.fontconfig.penultimate.enable by default. The defaults from fontconfig are sufficient.

  • The crashplan package and the crashplan service have been removed from nixpkgs due to crashplan shutting down the service, while the crashplansb package and crashplan-small-business service have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

    The redis module was hardcoded to use the redis user, /run/redis as runtime directory and /var/lib/redis as state directory. Note that the NixOS module for Redis now disables kernel support for Transparent Huge Pages (THP), because this features causes major performance problems for Redis, e.g. (https://redis.io/topics/latency).

  • Using fonts.enableDefaultFonts adds a default emoji font noto-fonts-emoji.

    • services.xserver.enable

    • programs.sway.enable

    • programs.way-cooler.enable

    • services.xrdp.enable

  • The altcoins categorization of packages has been removed. You now access these packages at the top level, ie. nix-shell -p dogecoin instead of nix-shell -p altcoins.dogecoin, etc.

  • Ceph has been upgraded to v14.2.1. See the release notes for details. The mgr dashboard as well as osds backed by loop-devices is no longer explicitly supported by the package and module. Note: There’s been some issues with python-cherrypy, which is used by the dashboard and prometheus mgr modules (and possibly others), hence 0000-dont-check-cherrypy-version.patch.

  • pkgs.weechat is now compiled against pkgs.python3. Weechat also recommends to use Python3 in their docs.

Release 19.03 (“Koi”, 2019/04/11)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • End of support is planned for end of October 2019, handing over to 19.09.

  • The default Python 3 interpreter is now CPython 3.7 instead of CPython 3.6.

  • Added the Pantheon desktop environment. It can be enabled through services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon.enable.

    Note

    By default, services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon enables LightDM as a display manager, as pantheon’s screen locking implementation relies on it. Because of that it is recommended to leave LightDM enabled. If you’d like to disable it anyway, set services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.enable to false and enable your preferred display manager.

    Also note that Pantheon’s LightDM greeter is not enabled by default, because it has numerous issues in NixOS and isn’t optimal for use here yet.

  • A major refactoring of the Kubernetes module has been completed. Refactorings primarily focus on decoupling components and enhancing security. Two-way TLS and RBAC has been enabled by default for all components, which slightly changes the way the module is configured. See: Kubernetes for details.

  • There is now a set of confinement options for systemd.services, which allows to restrict services into a chroot 2 ed environment that only contains the store paths from the runtime closure of the service.

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • ./programs/nm-applet.nix

  • There is a new security.googleOsLogin module for using OS Login to manage SSH access to Google Compute Engine instances, which supersedes the imperative and broken google-accounts-daemon used in nixos/modules/virtualisation/google-compute-config.nix.

  • ./services/misc/beanstalkd.nix

  • There is a new services.cockroachdb module for running CockroachDB databases. NixOS now ships with CockroachDB 2.1.x as well, available on x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux.

  • ./security/duosec.nix

  • The PAM module for Duo Security has been enabled for use. One can configure it using the security.duosec options along with the corresponding PAM option in security.pam.services.<name?>.duoSecurity.enable.

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • The minimum version of Nix required to evaluate Nixpkgs is now 2.0.

    • For users of NixOS 18.03 and 19.03, NixOS defaults to Nix 2.0, but supports using Nix 1.11 by setting nix.package = pkgs.nix1;. If this option is set to a Nix 1.11 package, you will need to either unset the option or upgrade it to Nix 2.0.

    • For users of NixOS 17.09, you will first need to upgrade Nix by setting nix.package = pkgs.nixStable2; and run nixos-rebuild switch as the root user.

    • For users of a daemon-less Nix installation on Linux or macOS, you can upgrade Nix by running curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh, or prior to doing a channel update, running nix-env -iA nix. If you have already run a channel update and Nix is no longer able to evaluate Nixpkgs, the error message printed should provide adequate directions for upgrading Nix.

    • For users of the Nix daemon on macOS, you can upgrade Nix by running sudo -i sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix'; sudo launchctl stop org.nixos.nix-daemon; sudo launchctl start org.nixos.nix-daemon.

  • The buildPythonPackage function now sets strictDeps = true to help distinguish between native and non-native dependencies in order to improve cross-compilation compatibility. Note however that this may break user expressions.

  • The buildPythonPackage function now sets LANG = C.UTF-8 to enable Unicode support. The glibcLocales package is no longer needed as a build input.

  • The Syncthing state and configuration data has been moved from services.syncthing.dataDir to the newly defined services.syncthing.configDir, which default to /var/lib/syncthing/.config/syncthing. This change makes possible to share synced directories using ACLs without Syncthing resetting the permission on every start.

  • The ntp module now has sane default restrictions. If you’re relying on the previous defaults, which permitted all queries and commands from all firewall-permitted sources, you can set services.ntp.restrictDefault and services.ntp.restrictSource to [].

  • Package rabbitmq_server is renamed to rabbitmq-server.

  • The light module no longer uses setuid binaries, but udev rules. As a consequence users of that module have to belong to the video group in order to use the executable (i.e. users.users.yourusername.extraGroups = ["video"];).

  • Buildbot now supports Python 3 and its packages have been moved to pythonPackages. The options services.buildbot-master.package and services.buildbot-worker.package can be used to select the Python 2 or 3 version of the package.

  • Options services.znc.confOptions.networks.name.userName and services.znc.confOptions.networks.name.modulePackages were removed. They were never used for anything and can therefore safely be removed.

  • Package wasm has been renamed proglodyte-wasm. The package wasm will be pointed to ocamlPackages.wasm in 19.09, so make sure to update your configuration if you want to keep proglodyte-wasm

  • When the nixpkgs.pkgs option is set, NixOS will no longer ignore the nixpkgs.overlays option. The old behavior can be recovered by setting nixpkgs.overlays = lib.mkForce [];.

  • OpenSMTPD has been upgraded to version 6.4.0p1. This release makes backwards-incompatible changes to the configuration file format. See man smtpd.conf for more information on the new file format.

  • The versioned postgresql have been renamed to use underscore number separators. For example, postgresql96 has been renamed to postgresql_9_6.

  • Package consul-ui and passthrough consul.ui have been removed. The package consul now uses upstream releases that vendor the UI into the binary. See #48714 for details.

  • Slurm introduces the new option services.slurm.stateSaveLocation, which is now set to /var/spool/slurm by default (instead of /var/spool). Make sure to move all files to the new directory or to set the option accordingly.

    The slurmctld now runs as user slurm instead of root. If you want to keep slurmctld running as root, set services.slurm.user = root.

    The options services.slurm.nodeName and services.slurm.partitionName are now sets of strings to correctly reflect that fact that each of these options can occur more than once in the configuration.

  • The solr package has been upgraded from 4.10.3 to 7.5.0 and has undergone some major changes. The services.solr module has been updated to reflect these changes. Please review http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ carefully before upgrading.

  • Package ckb is renamed to ckb-next, and options hardware.ckb.* are renamed to hardware.ckb-next.*.

  • The option services.xserver.displayManager.job.logToFile which was previously set to true when using the display managers lightdm, sddm or xpra has been reset to the default value (false).

  • Network interface indiscriminate NixOS firewall options (networking.firewall.allow*) are now preserved when also setting interface specific rules such as networking.firewall.interfaces.en0.allow*. These rules continue to use the pseudo device “default” (networking.firewall.interfaces.default.*), and assigning to this pseudo device will override the (networking.firewall.allow*) options.

  • The nscd service now disables all caching of passwd and group databases by default. This was interfering with the correct functioning of the libnss_systemd.so module which is used by systemd to manage uids and usernames in the presence of DynamicUser= in systemd services. This was already the default behaviour in presence of services.sssd.enable = true because nscd caching would interfere with sssd in unpredictable ways as well. Because we’re using nscd not for caching, but for convincing glibc to find NSS modules in the nix store instead of an absolute path, we have decided to disable caching globally now, as it’s usually not the behaviour the user wants and can lead to surprising behaviour. Furthermore, negative caching of host lookups is also disabled now by default. This should fix the issue of dns lookups failing in the presence of an unreliable network.

    If the old behaviour is desired, this can be restored by setting the services.nscd.config option with the desired caching parameters.

    {
      services.nscd.config =
      ''
      server-user             nscd
      threads                 1
      paranoia                no
      debug-level             0
    
      enable-cache            passwd          yes
      positive-time-to-live   passwd          600
      negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
      suggested-size          passwd          211
      check-files             passwd          yes
      persistent              passwd          no
      shared                  passwd          yes
    
      enable-cache            group           yes
      positive-time-to-live   group           3600
      negative-time-to-live   group           60
      suggested-size          group           211
      check-files             group           yes
      persistent              group           no
      shared                  group           yes
    
      enable-cache            hosts           yes
      positive-time-to-live   hosts           600
      negative-time-to-live   hosts           5
      suggested-size          hosts           211
      check-files             hosts           yes
      persistent              hosts           no
      shared                  hosts           yes
      '';
    }
    

    See #50316 for details.

  • GitLab Shell previously used the nix store paths for the gitlab-shell command in its authorized_keys file, which might stop working after garbage collection. To circumvent that, we regenerated that file on each startup. As gitlab-shell has now been changed to use /var/run/current-system/sw/bin/gitlab-shell, this is not necessary anymore, but there might be leftover lines with a nix store path. Regenerate the authorized_keys file via sudo -u git -H gitlab-rake gitlab:shell:setup in that case.

  • The pam_unix account module is now loaded with its control field set to required instead of sufficient, so that later PAM account modules that might do more extensive checks are being executed. Previously, the whole account module verification was exited prematurely in case a nss module provided the account name to pam_unix. The LDAP and SSSD NixOS modules already add their NSS modules when enabled. In case your setup breaks due to some later PAM account module previously shadowed, or failing NSS lookups, please file a bug. You can get back the old behaviour by manually setting security.pam.services.<name?>.text.

  • The pam_unix password module is now loaded with its control field set to sufficient instead of required, so that password managed only by later PAM password modules are being executed. Previously, for example, changing an LDAP account’s password through PAM was not possible: the whole password module verification was exited prematurely by pam_unix, preventing pam_ldap to manage the password as it should.

  • fish has been upgraded to 3.0. It comes with a number of improvements and backwards incompatible changes. See the fish release notes for more information.

  • The ibus-table input method has had a change in config format, which causes all previous settings to be lost. See this commit message for details.

  • NixOS module system type types.optionSet and lib.mkOption argument options are deprecated. Use types.submodule instead. (#54637)

  • matrix-synapse has been updated to version 0.99. It will no longer generate a self-signed certificate on first launch and will be the last version to accept self-signed certificates. As such, it is now recommended to use a proper certificate verified by a root CA (for example Let’s Encrypt). The new manual chapter on Matrix contains a working example of using nginx as a reverse proxy in front of matrix-synapse, using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

  • mailutils now works by default when sendmail is not in a setuid wrapper. As a consequence, the sendmailPath argument, having lost its main use, has been removed.

  • graylog has been upgraded from version 2.* to 3.*. Some setups making use of extraConfig (especially those exposing Graylog via reverse proxies) need to be updated as upstream removed/replaced some settings. See Upgrading Graylog for details.

  • The option users.ldap.bind.password was renamed to users.ldap.bind.passwordFile, and needs to be readable by the nslcd user. Same applies to the new users.ldap.daemon.rootpwmodpwFile option.

  • nodejs-6_x is end-of-life. nodejs-6_x, nodejs-slim-6_x and nodePackages_6_x are removed.

Other Notable Changes

  • The services.matomo module gained the option services.matomo.package which determines the used Matomo version.

    The Matomo module now also comes with the systemd service matomo-archive-processing.service and a timer that automatically triggers archive processing every hour. This means that you can safely disable browser triggers for Matomo archiving at Administration > System > General Settings.

    Additionally, you can enable to delete old visitor logs at Administration > System > Privacy, but make sure that you run systemctl start matomo-archive-processing.service at least once without errors if you have already collected data before, so that the reports get archived before the source data gets deleted.

  • composableDerivation along with supporting library functions has been removed.

  • The deprecated truecrypt package has been removed and truecrypt attribute is now an alias for veracrypt. VeraCrypt is backward-compatible with TrueCrypt volumes. Note that cryptsetup also supports loading TrueCrypt volumes.

  • The Kubernetes DNS addons, kube-dns, has been replaced with CoreDNS. This change is made in accordance with Kubernetes making CoreDNS the official default starting from Kubernetes v1.11. Please beware that upgrading DNS-addon on existing clusters might induce minor downtime while the DNS-addon terminates and re-initializes. Also note that the DNS-service now runs with 2 pod replicas by default. The desired number of replicas can be configured using: services.kubernetes.addons.dns.replicas.

  • The quassel-webserver package and module was removed from nixpkgs due to the lack of maintainers.

  • The manual gained a new chapter on self-hosting matrix-synapse and riot-web , the most prevalent server and client implementations for the Matrix federated communication network.

  • The astah-community package was removed from nixpkgs due to it being discontinued and the downloads not being available anymore.

  • The httpd service now saves log files with a .log file extension by default for easier integration with the logrotate service.

  • The owncloud server packages and httpd subservice module were removed from nixpkgs due to the lack of maintainers.

  • It is possible now to uze ZRAM devices as general purpose ephemeral block devices, not only as swap. Using more than 1 device as ZRAM swap is no longer recommended, but is still possible by setting zramSwap.swapDevices explicitly.

    ZRAM algorithm can be changed now.

    Changes to ZRAM algorithm are applied during nixos-rebuild switch, so make sure you have enough swap space on disk to survive ZRAM device rebuild. Alternatively, use nixos-rebuild boot; reboot.

  • Flat volumes are now disabled by default in hardware.pulseaudio. This has been done to prevent applications, which are unaware of this feature, setting their volumes to 100% on startup causing harm to your audio hardware and potentially your ears.

    Note

    With this change application specific volumes are relative to the master volume which can be adjusted independently, whereas before they were absolute; meaning that in effect, it scaled the device-volume with the volume of the loudest application.

  • The ndppd module now supports all config options provided by the current upstream version as service options. Additionally the ndppd package doesn’t contain the systemd unit configuration from upstream anymore, the unit is completely configured by the NixOS module now.

  • New installs of NixOS will default to the Redmine 4.x series unless otherwise specified in services.redmine.package while existing installs of NixOS will default to the Redmine 3.x series.

  • The Grafana module now supports declarative datasource and dashboard provisioning.

  • The use of insecure ports on kubernetes has been deprecated. Thus options: services.kubernetes.apiserver.port and services.kubernetes.controllerManager.port has been renamed to .insecurePort, and default of both options has changed to 0 (disabled).

  • Note that the default value of services.kubernetes.apiserver.bindAddress has changed from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0, allowing the apiserver to be accessible from outside the master node itself. If the apiserver insecurePort is enabled, it is strongly recommended to only bind on the loopback interface. See: services.kubernetes.apiserver.insecurebindAddress.

  • The option services.kubernetes.apiserver.allowPrivileged and services.kubernetes.kubelet.allowPrivileged now defaults to false. Disallowing privileged containers on the cluster.

  • The kubernetes module does no longer add the kubernetes package to environment.systemPackages implicitly.

  • The intel driver has been removed from the default list of X.org video drivers. The modesetting driver should take over automatically, it is better maintained upstream and has less problems with advanced X11 features. This can lead to a change in the output names used by xrandr. Some performance regressions on some GPU models might happen. Some OpenCL and VA-API applications might also break (Beignet seems to provide OpenCL support with modesetting driver, too). Kernel mode setting API does not support backlight control, so xbacklight tool will not work; backlight level can be controlled directly via /sys/ or with brightnessctl. Users who need this functionality more than multi-output XRandR are advised to add `intel` to `videoDrivers` and report an issue (or provide additional details in an existing one)

  • Openmpi has been updated to version 4.0.0, which removes some deprecated MPI-1 symbols. This may break some older applications that still rely on those symbols. An upgrade guide can be found here.

    The nginx package now relies on OpenSSL 1.1 and supports TLS 1.3 by default. You can set the protocols used by the nginx service using services.nginx.sslProtocols.

  • A new subcommand nixos-rebuild edit was added.

Release 18.09 (“Jellyfish”, 2018/10/05)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following notable updates:

  • End of support is planned for end of April 2019, handing over to 19.03.

  • Platform support: x86_64-linux and x86_64-darwin as always. Support for aarch64-linux is as with the previous releases, not equivalent to the x86-64-linux release, but with efforts to reach parity.

  • Nix has been updated to 2.1; see its release notes.

  • Core versions: linux: 4.14 LTS (unchanged), glibc: 2.26 → 2.27, gcc: 7 (unchanged), systemd: 237 → 239.

  • Desktop version changes: gnome: 3.26 → 3.28, (KDE) plasma-desktop: 5.12 → 5.13.

Notable changes and additions for 18.09 include:

  • Support for wrapping binaries using firejail has been added through programs.firejail.wrappedBinaries.

    For example

    {
      programs.firejail = {
        enable = true;
        wrappedBinaries = {
          firefox = "${lib.getBin pkgs.firefox}/bin/firefox";
          mpv = "${lib.getBin pkgs.mpv}/bin/mpv";
        };
      };
    }
    

    This will place firefox and mpv binaries in the global path wrapped by firejail.

  • User channels are now in the default NIX_PATH, allowing users to use their personal nix-channel defined channels in nix-build and nix-shell commands, as well as in imports like import <mychannel>.

    For example

    $ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable nixpkgsunstable
    $ nix-channel --update
    $ nix-build '<nixpkgsunstable>' -A gitFull
    $ nix run -f '<nixpkgsunstable>' gitFull
    $ nix-instantiate -E '(import <nixpkgsunstable> {}).gitFull'
    

New Services

A curated selection of new services that were added since the last release:

  • The services.cassandra module has been reworked and was rewritten from scratch. The service has succeeding tests for the versions 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 and 3.11 of Apache Cassandra.

  • There is a new services.foundationdb module for deploying FoundationDB clusters.

  • When enabled the iproute2 will copy the files expected by ip route (e.g., rt_tables) in /etc/iproute2. This allows to write aliases for routing tables for instance.

  • services.strongswan-swanctl is a modern replacement for services.strongswan. You can use either one of them to setup IPsec VPNs but not both at the same time.

    services.strongswan-swanctl uses the swanctl command which uses the modern vici Versatile IKE Configuration Interface. The deprecated ipsec command used in services.strongswan is using the legacy stroke configuration interface.

  • The new services.elasticsearch-curator service periodically curates or manages, your Elasticsearch indices and snapshots.

Every new services:

  • ./config/xdg/autostart.nix

  • ./config/xdg/icons.nix

  • ./config/xdg/menus.nix

  • ./config/xdg/mime.nix

  • ./hardware/brightnessctl.nix

  • ./hardware/onlykey.nix

  • ./hardware/video/uvcvideo/default.nix

  • ./misc/documentation.nix

  • ./programs/firejail.nix

  • ./programs/iftop.nix

  • ./programs/sedutil.nix

  • ./programs/singularity.nix

  • ./programs/xss-lock.nix

  • ./programs/zsh/zsh-autosuggestions.nix

  • ./services/admin/oxidized.nix

  • ./services/backup/duplicati.nix

  • ./services/backup/restic.nix

  • ./services/backup/restic-rest-server.nix

  • ./services/cluster/hadoop/default.nix

  • ./services/databases/aerospike.nix

  • ./services/databases/monetdb.nix

  • ./services/desktops/bamf.nix

  • ./services/desktops/flatpak.nix

  • ./services/desktops/zeitgeist.nix

  • ./services/development/bloop.nix

  • ./services/development/jupyter/default.nix

  • ./services/hardware/lcd.nix

  • ./services/hardware/undervolt.nix

  • ./services/misc/clipmenu.nix

  • ./services/misc/gitweb.nix

  • ./services/misc/serviio.nix

  • ./services/misc/safeeyes.nix

  • ./services/misc/sysprof.nix

  • ./services/misc/weechat.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/datadog-agent.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/incron.nix

  • ./services/networking/dnsdist.nix

  • ./services/networking/freeradius.nix

  • ./services/networking/hans.nix

  • ./services/networking/morty.nix

  • ./services/networking/ndppd.nix

  • ./services/networking/ocserv.nix

  • ./services/networking/owamp.nix

  • ./services/networking/quagga.nix

  • ./services/networking/shadowsocks.nix

  • ./services/networking/stubby.nix

  • ./services/networking/zeronet.nix

  • ./services/security/certmgr.nix

  • ./services/security/cfssl.nix

  • ./services/security/oauth2_proxy_nginx.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/virtlyst.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/youtrack.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/hitch/default.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/hydron.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/meguca.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/nginx/gitweb.nix

  • ./virtualisation/kvmgt.nix

  • ./virtualisation/qemu-guest-agent.nix

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • Some licenses that were incorrectly not marked as unfree now are. This is the case for:

    • cc-by-nc-sa-20: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 2.0

    • cc-by-nc-sa-25: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 2.5

    • cc-by-nc-sa-30: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0

    • cc-by-nc-sa-40: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0

    • cc-by-nd-30: Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works v3.00

    • msrla: Microsoft Research License Agreement

  • The deprecated services.cassandra module has seen a complete rewrite. (See above.)

  • lib.strict is removed. Use builtins.seq instead.

  • The clementine package points now to the free derivation. clementineFree is removed now and clementineUnfree points to the package which is bundled with the unfree libspotify package.

  • The netcat package is now taken directly from OpenBSD’s libressl, instead of relying on Debian’s fork. The new version should be very close to the old version, but there are some minor differences. Importantly, flags like -b, -q, -C, and -Z are no longer accepted by the nc command.

  • The services.docker-registry.extraConfig object doesn’t contain environment variables anymore. Instead it needs to provide an object structure that can be mapped onto the YAML configuration defined in the docker/distribution docs.

  • gnucash has changed from version 2.4 to 3.x. If you’ve been using gnucash (version 2.4) instead of gnucash26 (version 2.6) you must open your Gnucash data file(s) with gnucash26 and then save them to upgrade the file format. Then you may use your data file(s) with Gnucash 3.x. See the upgrade documentation. Gnucash 2.4 is still available under the attribute gnucash24.

  • services.munge now runs as user (and group) munge instead of root. Make sure the key file is accessible to the daemon.

  • dockerTools.buildImage now uses null as default value for tag, which indicates that the nix output hash will be used as tag.

  • The ELK stack: elasticsearch, logstash and kibana has been upgraded from 2.* to 6.3.*. The 2.* versions have been unsupported since last year so they have been removed. You can still use the 5.* versions under the names elasticsearch5, logstash5 and kibana5.

    The elastic beats: filebeat, heartbeat, metricbeat and packetbeat have had the same treatment: they now target 6.3.* as well. The 5.* versions are available under the names: filebeat5, heartbeat5, metricbeat5 and packetbeat5

    The ELK-6.3 stack now comes with X-Pack by default. Since X-Pack is licensed under the Elastic License the ELK packages now have an unfree license. To use them you need to specify allowUnfree = true; in your nixpkgs configuration.

    Fortunately there is also a free variant of the ELK stack without X-Pack. The packages are available under the names: elasticsearch-oss, logstash-oss and kibana-oss.

  • Options boot.initrd.luks.devices.name.yubikey.ramfsMountPoint boot.initrd.luks.devices.name.yubikey.storage.mountPoint were removed. luksroot.nix module never supported more than one YubiKey at a time anyway, hence those options never had any effect. You should be able to remove them from your config without any issues.

  • stdenv.system and system in nixpkgs now refer to the host platform instead of the build platform. For native builds this is not change, let alone a breaking one. For cross builds, it is a breaking change, and stdenv.buildPlatform.system can be used instead for the old behavior. They should be using that anyways for clarity.

  • Groups kvm and render are introduced now, as systemd requires them.

Other Notable Changes

  • dockerTools.pullImage relies on image digest instead of image tag to download the image. The sha256 of a pulled image has to be updated.

  • lib.attrNamesToStr has been deprecated. Use more specific concatenation (lib.concat(Map)StringsSep) instead.

  • lib.addErrorContextToAttrs has been deprecated. Use builtins.addErrorContext directly.

  • lib.showVal has been deprecated. Use lib.traceSeqN instead.

  • lib.traceXMLVal has been deprecated. Use lib.traceValFn builtins.toXml instead.

  • lib.traceXMLValMarked has been deprecated. Use lib.traceValFn (x: str + builtins.toXML x) instead.

  • The pkgs argument to NixOS modules can now be set directly using nixpkgs.pkgs. Previously, only the system, config and overlays arguments could be used to influence pkgs.

  • A NixOS system can now be constructed more easily based on a preexisting invocation of Nixpkgs. For example:

    {
      inherit (pkgs.nixos {
        boot.loader.grub.enable = false;
        fileSystems."/".device = "/dev/xvda1";
      }) toplevel kernel initialRamdisk manual;
    }
    

    This benefits evaluation performance, lets you write Nixpkgs packages that depend on NixOS images and is consistent with a deployment architecture that would be centered around Nixpkgs overlays.

  • lib.traceValIfNot has been deprecated. Use if/then/else and lib.traceValSeq instead.

  • lib.traceCallXml has been deprecated. Please complain if you use the function regularly.

  • The attribute lib.nixpkgsVersion has been deprecated in favor of lib.version. Please refer to the discussion in NixOS/nixpkgs#39416 for further reference.

  • lib.recursiveUpdateUntil was not acting according to its specification. It has been fixed to act according to the docstring, and a test has been added.

  • The module for security.dhparams has two new options now:

    security.dhparams.stateless

    Puts the generated Diffie-Hellman parameters into the Nix store instead of managing them in a stateful manner in /var/lib/dhparams.

    security.dhparams.defaultBitSize

    The default bit size to use for the generated Diffie-Hellman parameters.

    Note

    The path to the actual generated parameter files should now be queried using config.security.dhparams.params.name.path because it might be either in the Nix store or in a directory configured by security.dhparams.path.

    Note

    For developers:

    Module implementers should not set a specific bit size in order to let users configure it by themselves if they want to have a different bit size than the default (2048).

    An example usage of this would be:

    { config, ... }:
    
    {
      security.dhparams.params.myservice = {};
      environment.etc."myservice.conf".text = ''
        dhparams = ${config.security.dhparams.params.myservice.path}
      '';
    }
    
  • networking.networkmanager.useDnsmasq has been deprecated. Use networking.networkmanager.dns instead.

  • The Kubernetes package has been bumped to major version 1.11. Please consult the release notes for details on new features and api changes.

  • The option services.kubernetes.apiserver.admissionControl was renamed to services.kubernetes.apiserver.enableAdmissionPlugins.

  • Recommended way to access the Kubernetes Dashboard is via HTTPS (TLS) Therefore; public service port for the dashboard has changed to 443 (container port 8443) and scheme to https.

  • The option services.kubernetes.apiserver.address was renamed to services.kubernetes.apiserver.bindAddress. Note that the default value has changed from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0.

  • The option services.kubernetes.apiserver.publicAddress was not used and thus has been removed.

  • The option services.kubernetes.addons.dashboard.enableRBAC was renamed to services.kubernetes.addons.dashboard.rbac.enable.

  • The Kubernetes Dashboard now has only minimal RBAC permissions by default. If dashboard cluster-admin rights are desired, set services.kubernetes.addons.dashboard.rbac.clusterAdmin to true. On existing clusters, in order for the revocation of privileges to take effect, the current ClusterRoleBinding for kubernetes-dashboard must be manually removed: kubectl delete clusterrolebinding kubernetes-dashboard

  • The programs.screen module provides allows to configure /etc/screenrc, however the module behaved fairly counterintuitive as the config exists, but the package wasn’t available. Since 18.09 pkgs.screen will be added to environment.systemPackages.

  • The module services.networking.hostapd now uses WPA2 by default.

  • s6Dns, s6Networking, s6LinuxUtils and s6PortableUtils renamed to s6-dns, s6-networking, s6-linux-utils and s6-portable-utils respectively.

  • The module option nix.useSandbox is now defaulted to true.

  • The config activation script of nixos-rebuild now reloads all user units for each authenticated user.

  • The default display manager is now LightDM. To use SLiM set services.xserver.displayManager.slim.enable to true.

  • NixOS option descriptions are now automatically broken up into individual paragraphs if the text contains two consecutive newlines, so it’s no longer necessary to use </para><para> to start a new paragraph.

  • Top-level buildPlatform, hostPlatform, and targetPlatform in Nixpkgs are deprecated. Please use their equivalents in stdenv instead: stdenv.buildPlatform, stdenv.hostPlatform, and stdenv.targetPlatform.

Release 18.03 (“Impala”, 2018/04/04)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • End of support is planned for end of October 2018, handing over to 18.09.

  • Platform support: x86_64-linux and x86_64-darwin since release time (the latter isn’t NixOS, really). Binaries for aarch64-linux are available, but no channel exists yet, as it’s waiting for some test fixes, etc.

  • Nix now defaults to 2.0; see its release notes.

  • Core version changes: linux: 4.9 -> 4.14, glibc: 2.25 -> 2.26, gcc: 6 -> 7, systemd: 234 -> 237.

  • Desktop version changes: gnome: 3.24 -> 3.26, (KDE) plasma-desktop: 5.10 -> 5.12.

  • MariaDB 10.2, updated from 10.1, is now the default MySQL implementation. While upgrading a few changes have been made to the infrastructure involved:

    • libmysql has been deprecated, please use mysql.connector-c instead, a compatibility passthru has been added to the MySQL packages.

    • The mysql57 package has a new static output containing the static libraries including libmysqld.a

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 7.2, updated from 7.1.

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • ./config/krb5/default.nix

  • ./hardware/digitalbitbox.nix

  • ./misc/label.nix

  • ./programs/ccache.nix

  • ./programs/criu.nix

  • ./programs/digitalbitbox/default.nix

  • ./programs/less.nix

  • ./programs/npm.nix

  • ./programs/plotinus.nix

  • ./programs/rootston.nix

  • ./programs/systemtap.nix

  • ./programs/sway.nix

  • ./programs/udevil.nix

  • ./programs/way-cooler.nix

  • ./programs/yabar.nix

  • ./programs/zsh/zsh-autoenv.nix

  • ./services/backup/borgbackup.nix

  • ./services/backup/crashplan-small-business.nix

  • ./services/desktops/dleyna-renderer.nix

  • ./services/desktops/dleyna-server.nix

  • ./services/desktops/pipewire.nix

  • ./services/desktops/gnome3/chrome-gnome-shell.nix

  • ./services/desktops/gnome3/tracker-miners.nix

  • ./services/hardware/fwupd.nix

  • ./services/hardware/interception-tools.nix

  • ./services/hardware/u2f.nix

  • ./services/hardware/usbmuxd.nix

  • ./services/mail/clamsmtp.nix

  • ./services/mail/dkimproxy-out.nix

  • ./services/mail/pfix-srsd.nix

  • ./services/misc/gitea.nix

  • ./services/misc/home-assistant.nix

  • ./services/misc/ihaskell.nix

  • ./services/misc/logkeys.nix

  • ./services/misc/novacomd.nix

  • ./services/misc/osrm.nix

  • ./services/misc/plexpy.nix

  • ./services/misc/pykms.nix

  • ./services/misc/tzupdate.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/fusion-inventory.nix

  • ./services/monitoring/prometheus/exporters.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/beegfs.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/davfs2.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/openafs/client.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/openafs/server.nix

  • ./services/network-filesystems/ceph.nix

  • ./services/networking/aria2.nix

  • ./services/networking/monero.nix

  • ./services/networking/nghttpx/default.nix

  • ./services/networking/nixops-dns.nix

  • ./services/networking/rxe.nix

  • ./services/networking/stunnel.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/matomo.nix

  • ./services/web-apps/restya-board.nix

  • ./services/web-servers/mighttpd2.nix

  • ./services/x11/fractalart.nix

  • ./system/boot/binfmt.nix

  • ./system/boot/grow-partition.nix

  • ./tasks/filesystems/ecryptfs.nix

  • ./virtualisation/hyperv-guest.nix

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • sound.enable now defaults to false.

  • Dollar signs in options under services.postfix are passed verbatim to Postfix, which will interpret them as the beginning of a parameter expression. This was already true for string-valued options in the previous release, but not for list-valued options. If you need to pass literal dollar signs through Postfix, double them.

  • The postage package (for web-based PostgreSQL administration) has been renamed to pgmanage. The corresponding module has also been renamed. To migrate please rename all services.postage options to services.pgmanage.

  • Package attributes starting with a digit have been prefixed with an underscore sign. This is to avoid quoting in the configuration and other issues with command-line tools like nix-env. The change affects the following packages:

    • 2048-in-terminal_2048-in-terminal

    • 90secondportraits_90secondportraits

    • 2bwm_2bwm

    • 389-ds-base_389-ds-base

  • The OpenSSH service no longer enables support for DSA keys by default, which could cause a system lock out. Update your keys or, unfavorably, re-enable DSA support manually.

    DSA support was deprecated in OpenSSH 7.0, due to it being too weak. To re-enable support, add PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-dss to the end of your services.openssh.extraConfig.

    After updating the keys to be stronger, anyone still on a pre-17.03 version is safe to jump to 17.03, as vetted here.

  • The openssh package now includes Kerberos support by default; the openssh_with_kerberos package is now a deprecated alias. If you do not want Kerberos support, you can do openssh.override { withKerberos = false; }. Note, this also applies to the openssh_hpn package.

  • cc-wrapper has been split in two; there is now also a bintools-wrapper. The most commonly used files in nix-support are now split between the two wrappers. Some commonly used ones, like nix-support/dynamic-linker, are duplicated for backwards compatibility, even though they rightly belong only in bintools-wrapper. Other more obscure ones are just moved.

  • The propagation logic has been changed. The new logic, along with new types of dependencies that go with, is thoroughly documented in the “Specifying dependencies” section of the “Standard Environment” chapter of the nixpkgs manual. The old logic isn’t but is easy to describe: dependencies were propagated as the same type of dependency no matter what. In practice, that means that many propagatedNativeBuildInputs should instead be propagatedBuildInputs. Thankfully, that was and is the least used type of dependency. Also, it means that some propagatedBuildInputs should instead be depsTargetTargetPropagated. Other types dependencies should be unaffected.

  • lib.addPassthru drv passthru is removed. Use lib.extendDerivation true passthru drv instead.

  • The memcached service no longer accept dynamic socket paths via services.memcached.socket. Unix sockets can be still enabled by services.memcached.enableUnixSocket and will be accessible at /run/memcached/memcached.sock.

  • The hardware.amdHybridGraphics.disable option was removed for lack of a maintainer. If you still need this module, you may wish to include a copy of it from an older version of nixos in your imports.

  • The merging of config options for services.postfix.config was buggy. Previously, if other options in the Postfix module like services.postfix.useSrs were set and the user set config options that were also set by such options, the resulting config wouldn’t include all options that were needed. They are now merged correctly. If config options need to be overridden, lib.mkForce or lib.mkOverride can be used.

  • The following changes apply if the stateVersion is changed to 18.03 or higher. For stateVersion = "17.09" or lower the old behavior is preserved.

    • matrix-synapse uses postgresql by default instead of sqlite. Migration instructions can be found here .

  • The jid package has been removed, due to maintenance overhead of a go package having non-versioned dependencies.

  • When using services.xserver.libinput (enabled by default in GNOME), it now handles all input devices, not just touchpads. As a result, you might need to re-evaluate any custom Xorg configuration. In particular, Option "XkbRules" "base" may result in broken keyboard layout.

  • The attic package was removed. A maintained fork called Borg should be used instead. Migration instructions can be found here.

  • The Piwik analytics software was renamed to Matomo:

    • The package pkgs.piwik was renamed to pkgs.matomo.

    • The service services.piwik was renamed to services.matomo.

    • The data directory /var/lib/piwik was renamed to /var/lib/matomo. All files will be moved automatically on first startup, but you might need to adjust your backup scripts.

    • The default serverName for the nginx configuration changed from piwik.${config.networking.hostName} to matomo.${config.networking.hostName}.${config.networking.domain} if config.networking.domain is set, matomo.${config.networking.hostName} if it is not set. If you change your serverName, remember you’ll need to update the trustedHosts[] array in /var/lib/matomo/config/config.ini.php as well.

    • The piwik user was renamed to matomo. The service will adjust ownership automatically for files in the data directory. If you use unix socket authentication, remember to give the new matomo user access to the database and to change the username to matomo in the [database] section of /var/lib/matomo/config/config.ini.php.

    • If you named your database `piwik`, you might want to rename it to `matomo` to keep things clean, but this is neither enforced nor required.

  • nodejs-4_x is end-of-life. nodejs-4_x, nodejs-slim-4_x and nodePackages_4_x are removed.

  • The pump.io NixOS module was removed. It is now maintained as an external module.

  • The Prosody XMPP server has received a major update. The following modules were renamed:

    • services.prosody.modules.httpserver is now services.prosody.modules.http_files

    • services.prosody.modules.console is now services.prosody.modules.admin_telnet

    Many new modules are now core modules, most notably services.prosody.modules.carbons and services.prosody.modules.mam.

    The better-performing libevent backend is now enabled by default.

    withCommunityModules now passes through the modules to services.prosody.extraModules. Use withOnlyInstalledCommunityModules for modules that should not be enabled directly, e.g lib_ldap.

  • All prometheus exporter modules are now defined as submodules. The exporters are configured using services.prometheus.exporters.

Other Notable Changes

  • ZNC option services.znc.mutable now defaults to true. That means that old configuration is not overwritten by default when update to the znc options are made.

  • The option networking.wireless.networks.<name>.auth has been added for wireless networks with WPA-Enterprise authentication. There is also a new extraConfig option to directly configure wpa_supplicant and hidden to connect to hidden networks.

  • In the module networking.interfaces.<name> the following options have been removed:

    • ipAddress

    • ipv6Address

    • prefixLength

    • ipv6PrefixLength

    • subnetMask

    To assign static addresses to an interface the options ipv4.addresses and ipv6.addresses should be used instead. The options ip4 and ip6 have been renamed to ipv4.addresses ipv6.addresses respectively. The new options ipv4.routes and ipv6.routes have been added to set up static routing.

  • The option services.logstash.listenAddress is now 127.0.0.1 by default. Previously the default behaviour was to listen on all interfaces.

  • services.btrfs.autoScrub has been added, to periodically check btrfs filesystems for data corruption. If there’s a correct copy available, it will automatically repair corrupted blocks.

  • displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.clock-format. has been added, the clock format string (as expected by strftime, e.g. %H:%M) to use with the lightdm gtk greeter panel.

    If set to null the default clock format is used.

  • displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.indicators has been added, a list of allowed indicator modules to use with the lightdm gtk greeter panel.

    Built-in indicators include ~a11y, ~language, ~session, ~power, ~clock, ~host, ~spacer. Unity indicators can be represented by short name (e.g. sound, power), service file name, or absolute path.

    If set to null the default indicators are used.

    In order to have the previous default configuration add

    {
      services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.indicators = [
        "~host" "~spacer"
        "~clock" "~spacer"
        "~session"
        "~language"
        "~a11y"
        "~power"
      ];
    }
    

    to your configuration.nix.

  • The NixOS test driver supports user services declared by systemd.user.services. The methods waitForUnit, getUnitInfo, startJob and stopJob provide an optional $user argument for that purpose.

  • Enabling bash completion on NixOS, programs.bash.enableCompletion, will now also enable completion for the Nix command line tools by installing the nix-bash-completions package.

  • The vim/kakoune plugin updater now reads from a CSV file: check pkgs/applications/editors/vim/plugins/vim-plugin-names out to see the new format

Release 17.09 (“Hummingbird”, 2017/09/??)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • The GNOME version is now 3.24. KDE Plasma was upgraded to 5.10, KDE Applications to 17.08.1 and KDE Frameworks to 5.37.

  • The user handling now keeps track of deallocated UIDs/GIDs. When a user or group is revived, this allows it to be allocated the UID/GID it had before. A consequence is that UIDs and GIDs are no longer reused.

  • The module option services.xserver.xrandrHeads now causes the first head specified in this list to be set as the primary head. Apart from that, it’s now possible to also set additional options by using an attribute set, for example:

    { services.xserver.xrandrHeads = [
        "HDMI-0"
        {
          output = "DVI-0";
          primary = true;
          monitorConfig = ''
            Option "Rotate" "right"
          '';
        }
      ];
    }
    

    This will set the DVI-0 output to be the primary head, even though HDMI-0 is the first head in the list.

  • The handling of SSL in the services.nginx module has been cleaned up, renaming the misnamed enableSSL to onlySSL which reflects its original intention. This is not to be used with the already existing forceSSL which creates a second non-SSL virtual host redirecting to the SSL virtual host. This by chance had worked earlier due to specific implementation details. In case you had specified both please remove the enableSSL option to keep the previous behaviour.

    Another addSSL option has been introduced to configure both a non-SSL virtual host and an SSL virtual host with the same configuration.

    Options to configure resolver options and upstream blocks have been introduced. See their information for further details.

    The port option has been replaced by a more generic listen option which makes it possible to specify multiple addresses, ports and SSL configs dependant on the new SSL handling mentioned above.

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • config/fonts/fontconfig-penultimate.nix

  • config/fonts/fontconfig-ultimate.nix

  • config/terminfo.nix

  • hardware/sensor/iio.nix

  • hardware/nitrokey.nix

  • hardware/raid/hpsa.nix

  • programs/browserpass.nix

  • programs/gnupg.nix

  • programs/qt5ct.nix

  • programs/slock.nix

  • programs/thefuck.nix

  • security/auditd.nix

  • security/lock-kernel-modules.nix

  • service-managers/docker.nix

  • service-managers/trivial.nix

  • services/admin/salt/master.nix

  • services/admin/salt/minion.nix

  • services/audio/slimserver.nix

  • services/cluster/kubernetes/default.nix

  • services/cluster/kubernetes/dns.nix

  • services/cluster/kubernetes/dashboard.nix

  • services/continuous-integration/hail.nix

  • services/databases/clickhouse.nix

  • services/databases/postage.nix

  • services/desktops/gnome3/gnome-disks.nix

  • services/desktops/gnome3/gpaste.nix

  • services/logging/SystemdJournal2Gelf.nix

  • services/logging/heartbeat.nix

  • services/logging/journalwatch.nix

  • services/logging/syslogd.nix

  • services/mail/mailhog.nix

  • services/mail/nullmailer.nix

  • services/misc/airsonic.nix

  • services/misc/autorandr.nix

  • services/misc/exhibitor.nix

  • services/misc/fstrim.nix

  • services/misc/gollum.nix

  • services/misc/irkerd.nix

  • services/misc/jackett.nix

  • services/misc/radarr.nix

  • services/misc/snapper.nix

  • services/monitoring/osquery.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/collectd-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/fritzbox-exporter.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/kbfs.nix

  • services/networking/dnscache.nix

  • services/networking/fireqos.nix

  • services/networking/iwd.nix

  • services/networking/keepalived/default.nix

  • services/networking/keybase.nix

  • services/networking/lldpd.nix

  • services/networking/matterbridge.nix

  • services/networking/squid.nix

  • services/networking/tinydns.nix

  • services/networking/xrdp.nix

  • services/security/shibboleth-sp.nix

  • services/security/sks.nix

  • services/security/sshguard.nix

  • services/security/torify.nix

  • services/security/usbguard.nix

  • services/security/vault.nix

  • services/system/earlyoom.nix

  • services/system/saslauthd.nix

  • services/web-apps/nexus.nix

  • services/web-apps/pgpkeyserver-lite.nix

  • services/web-apps/piwik.nix

  • services/web-servers/lighttpd/collectd.nix

  • services/web-servers/minio.nix

  • services/x11/display-managers/xpra.nix

  • services/x11/xautolock.nix

  • tasks/filesystems/bcachefs.nix

  • tasks/powertop.nix

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • In an Qemu-based virtualization environment, the network interface names changed from i.e. enp0s3 to ens3.

    This is due to a kernel configuration change. The new naming is consistent with those of other Linux distributions with systemd. See #29197 for more information.

    A machine is affected if the virt-what tool either returns qemu or kvm and has interface names used in any part of its NixOS configuration, in particular if a static network configuration with networking.interfaces is used.

    Before rebooting affected machines, please ensure:

    • Change the interface names in your NixOS configuration. The first interface will be called ens3, the second one ens8 and starting from there incremented by 1.

    • After changing the interface names, rebuild your system with nixos-rebuild boot to activate the new configuration after a reboot. If you switch to the new configuration right away you might lose network connectivity! If using nixops, deploy with nixops deploy --force-reboot.

  • The following changes apply if the stateVersion is changed to 17.09 or higher. For stateVersion = "17.03" or lower the old behavior is preserved.

    • The postgres default version was changed from 9.5 to 9.6.

    • The postgres superuser name has changed from root to postgres to more closely follow what other Linux distributions are doing.

    • The postgres default dataDir has changed from /var/db/postgres to /var/lib/postgresql/$psqlSchema where $psqlSchema is 9.6 for example.

    • The mysql default dataDir has changed from /var/mysql to /var/lib/mysql.

    • Radicale’s default package has changed from 1.x to 2.x. Instructions to migrate can be found here . It is also possible to use the newer version by setting the package to radicale2, which is done automatically when stateVersion is 17.09 or higher. The extraArgs option has been added to allow passing the data migration arguments specified in the instructions; see the radicale.nix NixOS test for an example migration.

  • The aiccu package was removed. This is due to SixXS sunsetting its IPv6 tunnel.

  • The fanctl package and fan module have been removed due to the developers not upstreaming their iproute2 patches and lagging with compatibility to recent iproute2 versions.

  • Top-level idea package collection was renamed. All JetBrains IDEs are now at jetbrains.

  • flexget’s state database cannot be upgraded to its new internal format, requiring removal of any existing db-config.sqlite which will be automatically recreated.

  • The ipfs service now doesn’t ignore the dataDir option anymore. If you’ve ever set this option to anything other than the default you’ll have to either unset it (so the default gets used) or migrate the old data manually with

    dataDir=<valueOfDataDir>
    mv /var/lib/ipfs/.ipfs/* $dataDir
    rmdir /var/lib/ipfs/.ipfs
    
  • The caddy service was previously using an extra .caddy directory in the data directory specified with the dataDir option. The contents of the .caddy directory are now expected to be in the dataDir.

  • The ssh-agent user service is not started by default anymore. Use programs.ssh.startAgent to enable it if needed. There is also a new programs.gnupg.agent module that creates a gpg-agent user service. It can also serve as a SSH agent if enableSSHSupport is set.

  • The services.tinc.networks.<name>.listenAddress option had a misleading name that did not correspond to its behavior. It now correctly defines the ip to listen for incoming connections on. To keep the previous behaviour, use services.tinc.networks.<name>.bindToAddress instead. Refer to the description of the options for more details.

  • tlsdate package and module were removed. This is due to the project being dead and not building with openssl 1.1.

  • wvdial package and module were removed. This is due to the project being dead and not building with openssl 1.1.

  • cc-wrapper’s setup-hook now exports a number of environment variables corresponding to binutils binaries, (e.g. LD, STRIP, RANLIB, etc). This is done to prevent packages’ build systems guessing, which is harder to predict, especially when cross-compiling. However, some packages have broken due to this—their build systems either not supporting, or claiming to support without adequate testing, taking such environment variables as parameters.

  • services.firefox.syncserver now runs by default as a non-root user. To accommodate this change, the default sqlite database location has also been changed. Migration should work automatically. Refer to the description of the options for more details.

  • The compiz window manager and package was removed. The system support had been broken for several years.

  • Touchpad support should now be enabled through libinput as synaptics is now deprecated. See the option services.xserver.libinput.enable.

  • grsecurity/PaX support has been dropped, following upstream’s decision to cease free support. See upstream’s announcement for more information. No complete replacement for grsecurity/PaX is available presently.

  • services.mysql now has declarative configuration of databases and users with the ensureDatabases and ensureUsers options.

    These options will never delete existing databases and users, especially not when the value of the options are changed.

    The MySQL users will be identified using Unix socket authentication. This authenticates the Unix user with the same name only, and that without the need for a password.

    If you have previously created a MySQL root user with a password, you will need to add root user for unix socket authentication before using the new options. This can be done by running the following SQL script:

    CREATE USER 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '';
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
    FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
    
    -- Optionally, delete the password-authenticated user:
    -- DROP USER 'root'@'localhost';
    
  • services.mysqlBackup now works by default without any user setup, including for users other than mysql.

    By default, the mysql user is no longer the user which performs the backup. Instead a system account mysqlbackup is used.

    The mysqlBackup service is also now using systemd timers instead of cron.

    Therefore, the services.mysqlBackup.period option no longer exists, and has been replaced with services.mysqlBackup.calendar, which is in the format of systemd.time(7).

    If you expect to be sent an e-mail when the backup fails, consider using a script which monitors the systemd journal for errors. Regretfully, at present there is no built-in functionality for this.

    You can check that backups still work by running systemctl start mysql-backup then systemctl status mysql-backup.

  • Templated systemd services e.g container@name are now handled correctly when switching to a new configuration, resulting in them being reloaded.

  • Steam: the newStdcpp parameter was removed and should not be needed anymore.

  • Redis has been updated to version 4 which mandates a cluster mass-restart, due to changes in the network handling, in order to ensure compatibility with networks NATing traffic.

Other Notable Changes

  • Modules can now be disabled by using disabledModules, allowing another to take it’s place. This can be used to import a set of modules from another channel while keeping the rest of the system on a stable release.

  • Updated to FreeType 2.7.1, including a new TrueType engine. The new engine replaces the Infinality engine which was the default in NixOS. The default font rendering settings are now provided by fontconfig-penultimate, replacing fontconfig-ultimate; the new defaults are less invasive and provide rendering that is more consistent with other systems and hopefully with each font designer’s intent. Some system-wide configuration has been removed from the Fontconfig NixOS module where user Fontconfig settings are available.

  • ZFS/SPL have been updated to 0.7.0, zfsUnstable, splUnstable have therefore been removed.

  • The time.timeZone option now allows the value null in addition to timezone strings. This value allows changing the timezone of a system imperatively using timedatectl set-timezone. The default timezone is still UTC.

  • Nixpkgs overlays may now be specified with a file as well as a directory. The value of <nixpkgs-overlays> may be a file, and ~/.config/nixpkgs/overlays.nix can be used instead of the ~/.config/nixpkgs/overlays directory.

    See the overlays chapter of the Nixpkgs manual for more details.

  • Definitions for /etc/hosts can now be specified declaratively with networking.hosts.

  • Two new options have been added to the installer loader, in addition to the default having changed. The kernel log verbosity has been lowered to the upstream default for the default options, in order to not spam the console when e.g. joining a network.

    This therefore leads to adding a new debug option to set the log level to the previous verbose mode, to make debugging easier, but still accessible easily.

    Additionally a copytoram option has been added, which makes it possible to remove the install medium after booting. This allows tethering from your phone after booting from it.

  • services.gitlab-runner.configOptions has been added to specify the configuration of gitlab-runners declaratively.

  • services.jenkins.plugins has been added to install plugins easily, this can be generated with jenkinsPlugins2nix.

  • services.postfix.config has been added to specify the main.cf with NixOS options. Additionally other options have been added to the postfix module and has been improved further.

  • The GitLab package and module have been updated to the latest 10.0 release.

  • The systemd-boot boot loader now lists the NixOS version, kernel version and build date of all bootable generations.

  • The dnscrypt-proxy service now defaults to using a random upstream resolver, selected from the list of public non-logging resolvers with DNSSEC support. Existing configurations can be migrated to this mode of operation by omitting the services.dnscrypt-proxy.resolverName option or setting it to "random".

Release 17.03 (“Gorilla”, 2017/03/31)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Nixpkgs is now extensible through overlays. See the Nixpkgs manual for more information.

  • This release is based on Glibc 2.25, GCC 5.4.0 and systemd 232. The default Linux kernel is 4.9 and Nix is at 1.11.8.

  • The default desktop environment now is KDE’s Plasma 5. KDE 4 has been removed

  • The setuid wrapper functionality now supports setting capabilities.

  • X.org server uses branch 1.19. Due to ABI incompatibilities, ati_unfree keeps forcing 1.17 and amdgpu-pro starts forcing 1.18.

  • Cross compilation has been rewritten. See the nixpkgs manual for details. The most obvious breaking change is that in derivations there is no .nativeDrv nor .crossDrv are now cross by default, not native.

  • The overridePackages function has been rewritten to be replaced by overlays

  • Packages in nixpkgs can be marked as insecure through listed vulnerabilities. See the Nixpkgs manual for more information.

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 7.1

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • hardware/ckb.nix

  • hardware/mcelog.nix

  • hardware/usb-wwan.nix

  • hardware/video/capture/mwprocapture.nix

  • programs/adb.nix

  • programs/chromium.nix

  • programs/gphoto2.nix

  • programs/java.nix

  • programs/mtr.nix

  • programs/oblogout.nix

  • programs/vim.nix

  • programs/wireshark.nix

  • security/dhparams.nix

  • services/audio/ympd.nix

  • services/computing/boinc/client.nix

  • services/continuous-integration/buildbot/master.nix

  • services/continuous-integration/buildbot/worker.nix

  • services/continuous-integration/gitlab-runner.nix

  • services/databases/riak-cs.nix

  • services/databases/stanchion.nix

  • services/desktops/gnome3/gnome-terminal-server.nix

  • services/editors/infinoted.nix

  • services/hardware/illum.nix

  • services/hardware/trezord.nix

  • services/logging/journalbeat.nix

  • services/mail/offlineimap.nix

  • services/mail/postgrey.nix

  • services/misc/couchpotato.nix

  • services/misc/docker-registry.nix

  • services/misc/errbot.nix

  • services/misc/geoip-updater.nix

  • services/misc/gogs.nix

  • services/misc/leaps.nix

  • services/misc/nix-optimise.nix

  • services/misc/ssm-agent.nix

  • services/misc/sssd.nix

  • services/monitoring/arbtt.nix

  • services/monitoring/netdata.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/default.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/alertmanager.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/blackbox-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/json-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/nginx-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/node-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/snmp-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/unifi-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/prometheus/varnish-exporter.nix

  • services/monitoring/sysstat.nix

  • services/monitoring/telegraf.nix

  • services/monitoring/vnstat.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/cachefilesd.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/glusterfs.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/ipfs.nix

  • services/networking/dante.nix

  • services/networking/dnscrypt-wrapper.nix

  • services/networking/fakeroute.nix

  • services/networking/flannel.nix

  • services/networking/htpdate.nix

  • services/networking/miredo.nix

  • services/networking/nftables.nix

  • services/networking/powerdns.nix

  • services/networking/pdns-recursor.nix

  • services/networking/quagga.nix

  • services/networking/redsocks.nix

  • services/networking/wireguard.nix

  • services/system/cgmanager.nix

  • services/torrent/opentracker.nix

  • services/web-apps/atlassian/confluence.nix

  • services/web-apps/atlassian/crowd.nix

  • services/web-apps/atlassian/jira.nix

  • services/web-apps/frab.nix

  • services/web-apps/nixbot.nix

  • services/web-apps/selfoss.nix

  • services/web-apps/quassel-webserver.nix

  • services/x11/unclutter-xfixes.nix

  • services/x11/urxvtd.nix

  • system/boot/systemd-nspawn.nix

  • virtualisation/ecs-agent.nix

  • virtualisation/lxcfs.nix

  • virtualisation/openstack/keystone.nix

  • virtualisation/openstack/glance.nix

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • Derivations have no .nativeDrv nor .crossDrv and are now cross by default, not native.

  • stdenv.overrides is now expected to take self and super arguments. See lib.trivial.extends for what those parameters represent.

  • ansible now defaults to ansible version 2 as version 1 has been removed due to a serious vulnerability unpatched by upstream.

  • gnome alias has been removed along with gtk, gtkmm and several others. Now you need to use versioned attributes, like gnome3.

  • The attribute name of the Radicale daemon has been changed from pythonPackages.radicale to radicale.

  • The stripHash bash function in stdenv changed according to its documentation; it now outputs the stripped name to stdout instead of putting it in the variable strippedName.

  • PHP now scans for extra configuration .ini files in /etc/php.d instead of /etc. This prevents accidentally loading non-PHP .ini files that may be in /etc.

  • Two lone top-level dict dbs moved into dictdDBs. This affects: dictdWordnet which is now at dictdDBs.wordnet and dictdWiktionary which is now at dictdDBs.wiktionary

  • Parsoid service now uses YAML configuration format. service.parsoid.interwikis is now called service.parsoid.wikis and is a list of either API URLs or attribute sets as specified in parsoid’s documentation.

  • Ntpd was replaced by systemd-timesyncd as the default service to synchronize system time with a remote NTP server. The old behavior can be restored by setting services.ntp.enable to true. Upstream time servers for all NTP implementations are now configured using networking.timeServers.

  • service.nylon is now declared using named instances. As an example:

    {
      services.nylon = {
        enable = true;
        acceptInterface = "br0";
        bindInterface = "tun1";
        port = 5912;
      };
    }
    

    should be replaced with:

    {
      services.nylon.myvpn = {
        enable = true;
        acceptInterface = "br0";
        bindInterface = "tun1";
        port = 5912;
      };
    }
    

    this enables you to declare a SOCKS proxy for each uplink.

  • overridePackages function no longer exists. It is replaced by overlays. For example, the following code:

    let
      pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
    in
      pkgs.overridePackages (self: super: ...)
    

    should be replaced by:

    let
      pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
    in
      import pkgs.path { overlays = [(self: super: ...)]; }
    
  • Autoloading connection tracking helpers is now disabled by default. This default was also changed in the Linux kernel and is considered insecure if not configured properly in your firewall. If you need connection tracking helpers (i.e. for active FTP) please enable networking.firewall.autoLoadConntrackHelpers and tune networking.firewall.connectionTrackingModules to suit your needs.

  • local_recipient_maps is not set to empty value by Postfix service. It’s an insecure default as stated by Postfix documentation. Those who want to retain this setting need to set it via services.postfix.extraConfig.

  • Iputils no longer provide ping6 and traceroute6. The functionality of these tools has been integrated into ping and traceroute respectively. To enforce an address family the new flags -4 and -6 have been added. One notable incompatibility is that specifying an interface (for link-local IPv6 for instance) is no longer done with the -I flag, but by encoding the interface into the address (ping fe80::1%eth0).

  • The socket handling of the services.rmilter module has been fixed and refactored. As rmilter doesn’t support binding to more than one socket, the options bindUnixSockets and bindInetSockets have been replaced by services.rmilter.bindSocket.*. The default is still a unix socket in /run/rmilter/rmilter.sock. Refer to the options documentation for more information.

  • The fetch* functions no longer support md5, please use sha256 instead.

  • The dnscrypt-proxy module interface has been streamlined around the extraArgs option. Where possible, legacy option declarations are mapped to extraArgs but will emit warnings. The resolverList has been outright removed: to use an unlisted resolver, use the customResolver option.

  • torbrowser now stores local state under ~/.local/share/tor-browser by default. Any browser profile data from the old location, ~/.torbrowser4, must be migrated manually.

  • The ihaskell, monetdb, offlineimap and sitecopy services have been removed.

Other Notable Changes

  • Module type system have a new extensible option types feature that allow to extend certain types, such as enum, through multiple option declarations of the same option across multiple modules.

  • jre now defaults to GTK UI by default. This improves visual consistency and makes Java follow system font style, improving the situation on HighDPI displays. This has a cost of increased closure size; for server and other headless workloads it’s recommended to use jre_headless.

  • Python 2.6 interpreter and package set have been removed.

  • The Python 2.7 interpreter does not use modules anymore. Instead, all CPython interpreters now include the whole standard library except for `tkinter`, which is available in the Python package set.

  • Python 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6 are now built deterministically and 3.4 mostly. Minor modifications had to be made to the interpreters in order to generate deterministic bytecode. This has security implications and is relevant for those using Python in a nix-shell. See the Nixpkgs manual for details.

  • The Python package sets now use a fixed-point combinator and the sets are available as attributes of the interpreters.

  • The Python function buildPythonPackage has been improved and can be used to build from Setuptools source, Flit source, and precompiled Wheels.

  • When adding new or updating current Python libraries, the expressions should be put in separate files in pkgs/development/python-modules and called from python-packages.nix.

  • The dnscrypt-proxy service supports synchronizing the list of public resolvers without working DNS resolution. This fixes issues caused by the resolver list becoming outdated. It also improves the viability of DNSCrypt only configurations.

  • Containers using bridged networking no longer lose their connection after changes to the host networking.

  • ZFS supports pool auto scrubbing.

  • The bind DNS utilities (e.g. dig) have been split into their own output and are now also available in pkgs.dnsutils and it is no longer necessary to pull in all of bind to use them.

  • Per-user configuration was moved from ~/.nixpkgs to ~/.config/nixpkgs. The former is still valid for config.nix for backwards compatibility.

Release 16.09 (“Flounder”, 2016/09/30)

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Many NixOS configurations and Nix packages now use significantly less disk space, thanks to the extensive work on closure size reduction. For example, the closure size of a minimal NixOS container went down from ~424 MiB in 16.03 to ~212 MiB in 16.09, while the closure size of Firefox went from ~651 MiB to ~259 MiB.

  • To improve security, packages are now built using various hardening features. See the Nixpkgs manual for more information.

  • Support for PXE netboot. See the section called “Booting from the “netboot” media (PXE)” for documentation.

  • X.org server 1.18. If you use the ati_unfree driver, 1.17 is still used due to an ABI incompatibility.

  • This release is based on Glibc 2.24, GCC 5.4.0 and systemd 231. The default Linux kernel remains 4.4.

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • (this will get automatically generated at release time)

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • A large number of packages have been converted to use the multiple outputs feature of Nix to greatly reduce the amount of required disk space, as mentioned above. This may require changes to any custom packages to make them build again; see the relevant chapter in the Nixpkgs manual for more information. (Additional caveat to packagers: some packaging conventions related to multiple-output packages were changed late (August 2016) in the release cycle and differ from the initial introduction of multiple outputs.)

  • Previous versions of Nixpkgs had support for all versions of the LTS Haskell package set. That support has been dropped. The previously provided haskell.packages.lts-x_y package sets still exist in name to avoid breaking user code, but these package sets don’t actually contain the versions mandated by the corresponding LTS release. Instead, our package set it loosely based on the latest available LTS release, i.e. LTS 7.x at the time of this writing. New releases of NixOS and Nixpkgs will drop those old names entirely. The motivation for this change has been discussed at length on the nix-dev mailing list and in Github issue #14897. Development strategies for Haskell hackers who want to rely on Nix and NixOS have been described in another nix-dev article.

  • Shell aliases for systemd sub-commands were dropped: start, stop, restart, status.

  • Redis now binds to 127.0.0.1 only instead of listening to all network interfaces. This is the default behavior of Redis 3.2

  • /var/empty is now immutable. Activation script runs chattr +i to forbid any modifications inside the folder. See the pull request for what bugs this caused.

  • Gitlab’s maintenance script gitlab-runner was removed and split up into the more clearer gitlab-run and gitlab-rake scripts, because gitlab-runner is a component of Gitlab CI.

  • services.xserver.libinput.accelProfile default changed from flat to adaptive, as per official documentation.

  • fonts.fontconfig.ultimate.rendering was removed because our presets were obsolete for some time. New presets are hardcoded into FreeType; you can select a preset via fonts.fontconfig.ultimate.preset. You can customize those presets via ordinary environment variables, using environment.variables.

  • The audit service is no longer enabled by default. Use security.audit.enable = true to explicitly enable it.

  • pkgs.linuxPackages.virtualbox now contains only the kernel modules instead of the VirtualBox user space binaries. If you want to reference the user space binaries, you have to use the new pkgs.virtualbox instead.

  • goPackages was replaced with separated Go applications in appropriate nixpkgs categories. Each Go package uses its own dependency set. There’s also a new go2nix tool introduced to generate a Go package definition from its Go source automatically.

  • services.mongodb.extraConfig configuration format was changed to YAML.

  • PHP has been upgraded to 7.0

Other notable improvements:

  • Revamped grsecurity/PaX support. There is now only a single general-purpose distribution kernel and the configuration interface has been streamlined. Desktop users should be able to set

    {
      security.grsecurity.enable = true;
    }
    

    to get a reasonably secure system without having to sacrifice too much functionality.

  • Special filesystems, like /proc, /run and others, now have the same mount options as recommended by systemd and are unified across different places in NixOS. Mount options are updated during nixos-rebuild switch if possible. One benefit from this is improved security — most such filesystems are now mounted with noexec, nodev and/or nosuid options.

  • The reverse path filter was interfering with DHCPv4 server operation in the past. An exception for DHCPv4 and a new option to log packets that were dropped due to the reverse path filter was added (networking.firewall.logReversePathDrops) for easier debugging.

  • Containers configuration within containers.<name>.config is now properly typed and checked. In particular, partial configurations are merged correctly.

  • The directory container setuid wrapper programs, /var/setuid-wrappers, is now updated atomically to prevent failures if the switch to a new configuration is interrupted.

  • services.xserver.startGnuPGAgent has been removed due to GnuPG 2.1.x bump. See how to achieve similar behavior. You might need to pkill gpg-agent after the upgrade to prevent a stale agent being in the way.

  • Declarative users could share the uid due to the bug in the script handling conflict resolution.

  • Gummi boot has been replaced using systemd-boot.

  • Hydra package and NixOS module were added for convenience.

Release 16.03 (“Emu”, 2016/03/31)

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Systemd 229, bringing numerous improvements over 217.

  • Linux 4.4 (was 3.18).

  • GCC 5.3 (was 4.9). Note that GCC 5 changes the C++ ABI in an incompatible way; this may cause problems if you try to link objects compiled with different versions of GCC.

  • Glibc 2.23 (was 2.21).

  • Binutils 2.26 (was 2.23.1). See #909

  • Improved support for ensuring bitwise reproducible builds. For example, stdenv now sets the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to a deterministic value, and Nix has gained an option to repeat a build a number of times to test determinism. An ongoing project, the goal of exact reproducibility is to allow binaries to be verified independently (e.g., a user might only trust binaries that appear in three independent binary caches).

  • Perl 5.22.

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • services/monitoring/longview.nix

  • hardware/video/webcam/facetimehd.nix

  • i18n/input-method/default.nix

  • i18n/input-method/fcitx.nix

  • i18n/input-method/ibus.nix

  • i18n/input-method/nabi.nix

  • i18n/input-method/uim.nix

  • programs/fish.nix

  • security/acme.nix

  • security/audit.nix

  • security/oath.nix

  • services/hardware/irqbalance.nix

  • services/mail/dspam.nix

  • services/mail/opendkim.nix

  • services/mail/postsrsd.nix

  • services/mail/rspamd.nix

  • services/mail/rmilter.nix

  • services/misc/autofs.nix

  • services/misc/bepasty.nix

  • services/misc/calibre-server.nix

  • services/misc/cfdyndns.nix

  • services/misc/gammu-smsd.nix

  • services/misc/mathics.nix

  • services/misc/matrix-synapse.nix

  • services/misc/octoprint.nix

  • services/monitoring/hdaps.nix

  • services/monitoring/heapster.nix

  • services/monitoring/longview.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/netatalk.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/xtreemfs.nix

  • services/networking/autossh.nix

  • services/networking/dnschain.nix

  • services/networking/gale.nix

  • services/networking/miniupnpd.nix

  • services/networking/namecoind.nix

  • services/networking/ostinato.nix

  • services/networking/pdnsd.nix

  • services/networking/shairport-sync.nix

  • services/networking/supplicant.nix

  • services/search/kibana.nix

  • services/security/haka.nix

  • services/security/physlock.nix

  • services/web-apps/pump.io.nix

  • services/x11/hardware/libinput.nix

  • services/x11/window-managers/windowlab.nix

  • system/boot/initrd-network.nix

  • system/boot/initrd-ssh.nix

  • system/boot/loader/loader.nix

  • system/boot/networkd.nix

  • system/boot/resolved.nix

  • virtualisation/lxd.nix

  • virtualisation/rkt.nix

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • We no longer produce graphical ISO images and VirtualBox images for i686-linux. A minimal ISO image is still provided.

  • Firefox and similar browsers are now wrapped by default. The package and attribute names are plain firefox or midori, etc. Backward-compatibility attributes were set up, but note that nix-env -u will not update your current firefox-with-plugins; you have to uninstall it and install firefox instead.

  • wmiiSnap has been replaced with wmii_hg, but services.xserver.windowManager.wmii.enable has been updated respectively so this only affects you if you have explicitly installed wmiiSnap.

  • jobs NixOS option has been removed. It served as compatibility layer between Upstart jobs and SystemD services. All services have been rewritten to use systemd.services

  • wmiimenu is removed, as it has been removed by the developers upstream. Use wimenu from the wmii-hg package.

  • Gitit is no longer automatically added to the module list in NixOS and as such there will not be any manual entries for it. You will need to add an import statement to your NixOS configuration in order to use it, e.g.

    {
      imports = [ <nixpkgs/nixos/modules/services/misc/gitit.nix> ];
    }
    

    will include the Gitit service configuration options.

  • nginx does not accept flags for enabling and disabling modules anymore. Instead it accepts modules argument, which is a list of modules to be built in. All modules now reside in nginxModules set. Example configuration:

    nginx.override {
      modules = [ nginxModules.rtmp nginxModules.dav nginxModules.moreheaders ];
    }
    
  • s3sync is removed, as it hasn’t been developed by upstream for 4 years and only runs with ruby 1.8. For an actively-developer alternative look at tarsnap and others.

  • ruby_1_8 has been removed as it’s not supported from upstream anymore and probably contains security issues.

  • tidy-html5 package is removed. Upstream only provided (lib)tidy5 during development, and now they went back to (lib)tidy to work as a drop-in replacement of the original package that has been unmaintained for years. You can (still) use the html-tidy package, which got updated to a stable release from this new upstream.

  • extraDeviceOptions argument is removed from bumblebee package. Instead there are now two separate arguments: extraNvidiaDeviceOptions and extraNouveauDeviceOptions for setting extra X11 options for nvidia and nouveau drivers, respectively.

  • The Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination no longer kills the X server by default. There’s a new option services.xserver.enableCtrlAltBackspace allowing to enable the combination again.

  • emacsPackagesNg now contains all packages from the ELPA, MELPA, and MELPA Stable repositories.

  • Data directory for Postfix MTA server is moved from /var/postfix to /var/lib/postfix. Old configurations are migrated automatically. service.postfix module has also received many improvements, such as correct directories’ access rights, new aliasFiles and mapFiles options and more.

  • Filesystem options should now be configured as a list of strings, not a comma-separated string. The old style will continue to work, but print a warning, until the 16.09 release. An example of the new style:

    {
      fileSystems."/example" = {
        device = "/dev/sdc";
        fsType = "btrfs";
        options = [ "noatime" "compress=lzo" "space_cache" "autodefrag" ];
      };
    }
    
  • CUPS, installed by services.printing module, now has its data directory in /var/lib/cups. Old configurations from /etc/cups are moved there automatically, but there might be problems. Also configuration options services.printing.cupsdConf and services.printing.cupsdFilesConf were removed because they had been allowing one to override configuration variables required for CUPS to work at all on NixOS. For most use cases, services.printing.extraConf and new option services.printing.extraFilesConf should be enough; if you encounter a situation when they are not, please file a bug.

    There are also Gutenprint improvements; in particular, a new option services.printing.gutenprint is added to enable automatic updating of Gutenprint PPMs; it’s greatly recommended to enable it instead of adding gutenprint to the drivers list.

  • services.xserver.vaapiDrivers has been removed. Use hardware.opengl.extraPackages{,32} instead. You can also specify VDPAU drivers there.

  • programs.ibus moved to i18n.inputMethod.ibus. The option programs.ibus.plugins changed to i18n.inputMethod.ibus.engines and the option to enable ibus changed from programs.ibus.enable to i18n.inputMethod.enabled. i18n.inputMethod.enabled should be set to the used input method name, "ibus" for ibus. An example of the new style:

    {
      i18n.inputMethod.enabled = "ibus";
      i18n.inputMethod.ibus.engines = with pkgs.ibus-engines; [ anthy mozc ];
    }
    

    That is equivalent to the old version:

    {
      programs.ibus.enable = true;
      programs.ibus.plugins = with pkgs; [ ibus-anthy mozc ];
    }
    
  • services.udev.extraRules option now writes rules to 99-local.rules instead of 10-local.rules. This makes all the user rules apply after others, so their results wouldn’t be overridden by anything else.

  • Large parts of the services.gitlab module has been been rewritten. There are new configuration options available. The stateDir option was renamned to statePath and the satellitesDir option was removed. Please review the currently available options.

  • The option services.nsd.zones.<name>.data no longer interpret the dollar sign ($) as a shell variable, as such it should not be escaped anymore. Thus the following zone data:

    $ORIGIN example.com.
    $TTL 1800
    @       IN      SOA     ns1.vpn.nbp.name.      admin.example.com. (
    
    

    Should modified to look like the actual file expected by nsd:

    $ORIGIN example.com.
    $TTL 1800
    @       IN      SOA     ns1.vpn.nbp.name.      admin.example.com. (
    
    
  • service.syncthing.dataDir options now has to point to exact folder where syncthing is writing to. Example configuration should look something like:

    {
      services.syncthing = {
          enable = true;
          dataDir = "/home/somebody/.syncthing";
          user = "somebody";
      };
    }
    
  • networking.firewall.allowPing is now enabled by default. Users are encouraged to configure an appropriate rate limit for their machines using the Kernel interface at /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_ratelimit and /proc/sys/net/ipv6/icmp/ratelimit or using the firewall itself, i.e. by setting the NixOS option networking.firewall.pingLimit.

  • Systems with some broadcom cards used to result into a generated config that is no longer accepted. If you get errors like

    error: path ‘/nix/store/*-broadcom-sta-*’ does not exist and cannot be created
    

    you should either re-run nixos-generate-config or manually replace "${config.boot.kernelPackages.broadcom_sta}" by config.boot.kernelPackages.broadcom_sta in your /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix. More discussion is on the github issue.

  • The services.xserver.startGnuPGAgent option has been removed. GnuPG 2.1.x changed the way the gpg-agent works, and that new approach no longer requires (or even supports) the “start everything as a child of the agent” scheme we’ve implemented in NixOS for older versions. To configure the gpg-agent for your X session, add the following code to ~/.bashrc or some file that’s sourced when your shell is started:

    GPG_TTY=$(tty)
    export GPG_TTY
    

    If you want to use gpg-agent for SSH, too, add the following to your session initialization (e.g. displayManager.sessionCommands)

        gpg-connect-agent /bye
        unset SSH_AGENT_PID
        export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="''${HOME}/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh"
    

    and make sure that

        enable-ssh-support
    

    is included in your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. You will need to use ssh-add to re-add your ssh keys. If gpg’s automatic transformation of the private keys to the new format fails, you will need to re-import your private keyring as well:

        gpg --import ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg
    

    The gpg-agent(1) man page has more details about this subject, i.e. in the “EXAMPLES” section.

Other notable improvements:

  • ejabberd module is brought back and now works on NixOS.

  • Input method support was improved. New NixOS modules (fcitx, nabi and uim), fcitx engines (chewing, hangul, m17n, mozc and table-other) and ibus engines (hangul and m17n) have been added.

Release 15.09 (“Dingo”, 2015/09/30)

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • The Haskell packages infrastructure has been re-designed from the ground up (“Haskell NG”). NixOS now distributes the latest version of every single package registered on Hackage – well in excess of 8,000 Haskell packages. Detailed instructions on how to use that infrastructure can be found in the User’s Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure. Users migrating from an earlier release may find helpful information below, in the list of backwards-incompatible changes. Furthermore, we distribute 51(!) additional Haskell package sets that provide every single LTS Haskell release since version 0.0 as well as the most recent Stackage Nightly snapshot. The announcement “Full Stackage Support in Nixpkgs” gives additional details.

  • Nix has been updated to version 1.10, which among other improvements enables cryptographic signatures on binary caches for improved security.

  • You can now keep your NixOS system up to date automatically by setting

{
  system.autoUpgrade.enable = true;
}

This will cause the system to periodically check for updates in your current channel and run nixos-rebuild.

  • This release is based on Glibc 2.21, GCC 4.9 and Linux 3.18.

  • GNOME has been upgraded to 3.16.

  • Xfce has been upgraded to 4.12.

  • KDE 5 has been upgraded to KDE Frameworks 5.10, Plasma 5.3.2 and Applications 15.04.3. KDE 4 has been updated to kdelibs-4.14.10.

  • E19 has been upgraded to 0.16.8.15.

The following new services were added since the last release:

  • services/mail/exim.nix

  • services/misc/apache-kafka.nix

  • services/misc/canto-daemon.nix

  • services/misc/confd.nix

  • services/misc/devmon.nix

  • services/misc/gitit.nix

  • services/misc/ihaskell.nix

  • services/misc/mbpfan.nix

  • services/misc/mediatomb.nix

  • services/misc/mwlib.nix

  • services/misc/parsoid.nix

  • services/misc/plex.nix

  • services/misc/ripple-rest.nix

  • services/misc/ripple-data-api.nix

  • services/misc/subsonic.nix

  • services/misc/sundtek.nix

  • services/monitoring/cadvisor.nix

  • services/monitoring/das_watchdog.nix

  • services/monitoring/grafana.nix

  • services/monitoring/riemann-tools.nix

  • services/monitoring/teamviewer.nix

  • services/network-filesystems/u9fs.nix

  • services/networking/aiccu.nix

  • services/networking/asterisk.nix

  • services/networking/bird.nix

  • services/networking/charybdis.nix

  • services/networking/docker-registry-server.nix

  • services/networking/fan.nix

  • services/networking/firefox/sync-server.nix

  • services/networking/gateone.nix

  • services/networking/heyefi.nix

  • services/networking/i2p.nix

  • services/networking/lambdabot.nix

  • services/networking/mstpd.nix

  • services/networking/nix-serve.nix

  • services/networking/nylon.nix

  • services/networking/racoon.nix

  • services/networking/skydns.nix

  • services/networking/shout.nix

  • services/networking/softether.nix

  • services/networking/sslh.nix

  • services/networking/tinc.nix

  • services/networking/tlsdated.nix

  • services/networking/tox-bootstrapd.nix

  • services/networking/tvheadend.nix

  • services/networking/zerotierone.nix

  • services/scheduling/marathon.nix

  • services/security/fprintd.nix

  • services/security/hologram.nix

  • services/security/munge.nix

  • services/system/cloud-init.nix

  • services/web-servers/shellinabox.nix

  • services/web-servers/uwsgi.nix

  • services/x11/unclutter.nix

  • services/x11/display-managers/sddm.nix

  • system/boot/coredump.nix

  • system/boot/loader/loader.nix

  • system/boot/loader/generic-extlinux-compatible

  • system/boot/networkd.nix

  • system/boot/resolved.nix

  • system/boot/timesyncd.nix

  • tasks/filesystems/exfat.nix

  • tasks/filesystems/ntfs.nix

  • tasks/filesystems/vboxsf.nix

  • virtualisation/virtualbox-host.nix

  • virtualisation/vmware-guest.nix

  • virtualisation/xen-dom0.nix

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • sshd no longer supports DSA and ECDSA host keys by default. If you have existing systems with such host keys and want to continue to use them, please set

{
  system.stateVersion = "14.12";
}

The new option system.stateVersion ensures that certain configuration changes that could break existing systems (such as the sshd host key setting) will maintain compatibility with the specified NixOS release. NixOps sets the state version of existing deployments automatically.

  • cron is no longer enabled by default, unless you have a non-empty services.cron.systemCronJobs. To force cron to be enabled, set services.cron.enable = true.

  • Nix now requires binary caches to be cryptographically signed. If you have unsigned binary caches that you want to continue to use, you should set nix.requireSignedBinaryCaches = false.

  • Steam now doesn’t need root rights to work. Instead of using *-steam-chrootenv, you should now just run steam. steamChrootEnv package was renamed to steam, and old steam package – to steamOriginal.

  • CMPlayer has been renamed to bomi upstream. Package cmplayer was accordingly renamed to bomi

  • Atom Shell has been renamed to Electron upstream. Package atom-shell was accordingly renamed to electron

  • Elm is not released on Hackage anymore. You should now use elmPackages.elm which contains the latest Elm platform.

  • The CUPS printing service has been updated to version 2.0.2. Furthermore its systemd service has been renamed to cups.service.

    Local printers are no longer shared or advertised by default. This behavior can be changed by enabling services.printing.defaultShared or services.printing.browsing respectively.

  • The VirtualBox host and guest options have been named more consistently. They can now found in virtualisation.virtualbox.host.* instead of services.virtualboxHost.* and virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.* instead of services.virtualboxGuest.*.

    Also, there now is support for the vboxsf file system using the fileSystems configuration attribute. An example of how this can be used in a configuration:

{
  fileSystems."/shiny" = {
    device = "myshinysharedfolder";
    fsType = "vboxsf";
  };
}
  • nix-env -qa” no longer discovers Haskell packages by name. The only packages visible in the global scope are ghc, cabal-install, and stack, but all other packages are hidden. The reason for this inconvenience is the sheer size of the Haskell package set. Name-based lookups are expensive, and most nix-env -qa operations would become much slower if we’d add the entire Hackage database into the top level attribute set. Instead, the list of Haskell packages can be displayed by running:

nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -qaP -A haskellPackages

Executable programs written in Haskell can be installed with:

nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -iA haskellPackages.pandoc

Installing Haskell libraries this way, however, is no longer supported. See the next item for more details.

  • Previous versions of NixOS came with a feature called ghc-wrapper, a small script that allowed GHC to transparently pick up on libraries installed in the user’s profile. This feature has been deprecated; ghc-wrapper was removed from the distribution. The proper way to register Haskell libraries with the compiler now is the haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages function. The User’s Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure provides more information about this subject.

  • All Haskell builds that have been generated with version 1.x of the cabal2nix utility are now invalid and need to be re-generated with a current version of cabal2nix to function. The most recent version of this tool can be installed by running nix-env -i cabal2nix.

  • The haskellPackages set in Nixpkgs used to have a function attribute called extension that users could override in their ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix files to configure additional attributes, etc. That function still exists, but it’s now called overrides.

  • The OpenBLAS library has been updated to version 0.2.14. Support for the x86_64-darwin platform was added. Dynamic architecture detection was enabled; OpenBLAS now selects microarchitecture-optimized routines at runtime, so optimal performance is achieved without the need to rebuild OpenBLAS locally. OpenBLAS has replaced ATLAS in most packages which use an optimized BLAS or LAPACK implementation.

  • The phpfpm is now using the default PHP version (pkgs.php) instead of PHP 5.4 (pkgs.php54).

  • The locate service no longer indexes the Nix store by default, preventing packages with potentially numerous versions from cluttering the output. Indexing the store can be activated by setting services.locate.includeStore = true.

  • The Nix expression search path (NIX_PATH) no longer contains /etc/nixos/nixpkgs by default. You can override NIX_PATH by setting nix.nixPath.

  • Python 2.6 has been marked as broken (as it no longer receives security updates from upstream).

  • Any use of module arguments such as pkgs to access library functions, or to define imports attributes will now lead to an infinite loop at the time of the evaluation.

    In case of an infinite loop, use the --show-trace command line argument and read the line just above the error message.

    $ nixos-rebuild build --show-trace
    …
    while evaluating the module argument `pkgs' in "/etc/nixos/my-module.nix":
    infinite recursion encountered
    

    Any use of pkgs.lib, should be replaced by lib, after adding it as argument of the module. The following module

    { config, pkgs, ... }:
    
    with pkgs.lib;
    
    {
      options = {
        foo = mkOption { … };
      };
      config = mkIf config.foo { … };
    }
    

    should be modified to look like:

    { config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
    
    with lib;
    
    {
      options = {
        foo = mkOption { option declaration };
      };
      config = mkIf config.foo { option definition };
    }
    

    When pkgs is used to download other projects to import their modules, and only in such cases, it should be replaced by (import <nixpkgs> {}). The following module

    { config, pkgs, ... }:
    
    let
      myProject = pkgs.fetchurl {
        src = url;
        sha256 = hash;
      };
    in
    
    {
      imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ];
    }
    

    should be modified to look like:

    { config, pkgs, ... }:
    
    let
      myProject = (import <nixpkgs> {}).fetchurl {
        src = url;
        sha256 = hash;
      };
    in
    
    {
      imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ];
    }
    

Other notable improvements:

  • The nixos and nixpkgs channels were unified, so one can use nix-env -iA nixos.bash instead of nix-env -iA nixos.pkgs.bash. See the commit for details.

  • Users running an SSH server who worry about the quality of their /etc/ssh/moduli file with respect to the vulnerabilities discovered in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange can now replace OpenSSH’s default version with one they generated themselves using the new services.openssh.moduliFile option.

  • A newly packaged TeX Live 2015 is provided in pkgs.texlive, split into 6500 nix packages. For basic user documentation see the source. Beware of an issue when installing a too large package set. The plan is to deprecate and maybe delete the original TeX packages until the next release.

  • buildEnv.env on all Python interpreters is now available for nix-shell interoperability.

Release 14.12 (“Caterpillar”, 2014/12/30)

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

  • Systemd has been updated to version 217, which has numerous improvements.

  • Nix has been updated to 1.8.

  • NixOS is now based on Glibc 2.20.

  • KDE has been updated to 4.14.

  • The default Linux kernel has been updated to 3.14.

  • If users.mutableUsers is enabled (the default), changes made to the declaration of a user or group will be correctly realised when running nixos-rebuild. For instance, removing a user specification from configuration.nix will cause the actual user account to be deleted. If users.mutableUsers is disabled, it is no longer necessary to specify UIDs or GIDs; if omitted, they are allocated dynamically.

Following new services were added since the last release:

  • atftpd

  • bosun

  • bspwm

  • chronos

  • collectd

  • consul

  • cpuminer-cryptonight

  • crashplan

  • dnscrypt-proxy

  • docker-registry

  • docker

  • etcd

  • fail2ban

  • fcgiwrap

  • fleet

  • fluxbox

  • gdm

  • geoclue2

  • gitlab

  • gitolite

  • gnome3.gnome-documents

  • gnome3.gnome-online-miners

  • gnome3.gvfs

  • gnome3.seahorse

  • hbase

  • i2pd

  • influxdb

  • kubernetes

  • liquidsoap

  • lxc

  • mailpile

  • mesos

  • mlmmj

  • monetdb

  • mopidy

  • neo4j

  • nsd

  • openntpd

  • opentsdb

  • openvswitch

  • parallels-guest

  • peerflix

  • phd

  • polipo

  • prosody

  • radicale

  • redmine

  • riemann

  • scollector

  • seeks

  • siproxd

  • strongswan

  • tcsd

  • teamspeak3

  • thermald

  • torque/mrom

  • torque/server

  • uhub

  • unifi

  • znc

  • zookeeper

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • The default version of Apache httpd is now 2.4. If you use the extraConfig option to pass literal Apache configuration text, you may need to update it — see Apache’s documentation for details. If you wish to continue to use httpd 2.2, add the following line to your NixOS configuration:

    {
      services.httpd.package = pkgs.apacheHttpd_2_2;
    }
    
  • PHP 5.3 has been removed because it is no longer supported by the PHP project. A migration guide is available.

  • The host side of a container virtual Ethernet pair is now called ve-container-name rather than c-container-name.

  • GNOME 3.10 support has been dropped. The default GNOME version is now 3.12.

  • VirtualBox has been upgraded to 4.3.20 release. Users may be required to run rm -rf /tmp/.vbox*. The line imports = [ <nixpkgs/nixos/modules/programs/virtualbox.nix> ] is no longer necessary, use services.virtualboxHost.enable = true instead.

    Also, hardening mode is now enabled by default, which means that unless you want to use USB support, you no longer need to be a member of the vboxusers group.

  • Chromium has been updated to 39.0.2171.65. enablePepperPDF is now enabled by default. chromium*Wrapper packages no longer exist, because upstream removed NSAPI support. chromium-stable has been renamed to chromium.

  • Python packaging documentation is now part of nixpkgs manual. To override the python packages available to a custom python you now use pkgs.pythonFull.buildEnv.override instead of pkgs.pythonFull.override.

  • boot.resumeDevice = "8:6" is no longer supported. Most users will want to leave it undefined, which takes the swap partitions automatically. There is an evaluation assertion to ensure that the string starts with a slash.

  • The system-wide default timezone for NixOS installations changed from CET to UTC. To choose a different timezone for your system, configure time.timeZone in configuration.nix. A fairly complete list of possible values for that setting is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones.

  • GNU screen has been updated to 4.2.1, which breaks the ability to connect to sessions created by older versions of screen.

  • The Intel GPU driver was updated to the 3.x prerelease version (used by most distributions) and supports DRI3 now.

Release 14.04 (“Baboon”, 2014/04/30)

This is the second stable release branch of NixOS. In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages and modules, this release has the following highlights:

  • Installation on UEFI systems is now supported. See Installing NixOS for details.

  • Systemd has been updated to version 212, which has numerous improvements. NixOS now automatically starts systemd user instances when you log in. You can define global user units through the systemd.unit.* options.

  • NixOS is now based on Glibc 2.19 and GCC 4.8.

  • The default Linux kernel has been updated to 3.12.

  • KDE has been updated to 4.12.

  • GNOME 3.10 experimental support has been added.

  • Nix has been updated to 1.7 (details).

  • NixOS now supports fully declarative management of users and groups. If you set users.mutableUsers to false, then the contents of /etc/passwd and /etc/group will be congruent to your NixOS configuration. For instance, if you remove a user from users.extraUsers and run nixos-rebuild, the user account will cease to exist. Also, imperative commands for managing users and groups, such as useradd, are no longer available. If users.mutableUsers is true (the default), then behaviour is unchanged from NixOS 13.10.

  • NixOS now has basic container support, meaning you can easily run a NixOS instance as a container in a NixOS host system. These containers are suitable for testing and experimentation but not production use, since they’re not fully isolated from the host. See Container Management for details.

  • Systemd units provided by packages can now be overridden from the NixOS configuration. For instance, if a package foo provides systemd units, you can say:

    {
      systemd.packages = [ pkgs.foo ];
    }
    

    to enable those units. You can then set or override unit options in the usual way, e.g.

    {
      systemd.services.foo.wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
      systemd.services.foo.serviceConfig.MemoryLimit = "512M";
    }
    

    When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

  • Nixpkgs no longer exposes unfree packages by default. If your NixOS configuration requires unfree packages from Nixpkgs, you need to enable support for them explicitly by setting:

    {
      nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
    }
    

    Otherwise, you get an error message such as:

        error: package ‘nvidia-x11-331.49-3.12.17’ in ‘…/nvidia-x11/default.nix:56’
          has an unfree license, refusing to evaluate
    
  • The Adobe Flash player is no longer enabled by default in the Firefox and Chromium wrappers. To enable it, you must set:

    {
      nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
      nixpkgs.config.firefox.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Firefox
      nixpkgs.config.chromium.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Chromium
    }
    
  • The firewall is now enabled by default. If you don’t want this, you need to disable it explicitly:

    {
      networking.firewall.enable = false;
    }
    
  • The option boot.loader.grub.memtest86 has been renamed to boot.loader.grub.memtest86.enable.

  • The mysql55 service has been merged into the mysql service, which no longer sets a default for the option services.mysql.package.

  • Package variants are now differentiated by suffixing the name, rather than the version. For instance, sqlite-3.8.4.3-interactive is now called sqlite-interactive-3.8.4.3. This ensures that nix-env -i sqlite is unambiguous, and that nix-env -u won’t “upgrade” sqlite to sqlite-interactive or vice versa. Notably, this change affects the Firefox wrapper (which provides plugins), as it is now called firefox-wrapper. So when using nix-env, you should do nix-env -e firefox; nix-env -i firefox-wrapper if you want to keep using the wrapper. This change does not affect declarative package management, since attribute names like pkgs.firefoxWrapper were already unambiguous.

  • The symlink /etc/ca-bundle.crt is gone. Programs should instead use the environment variable OPENSSL_X509_CERT_FILE (which points to /etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt).

Release 13.10 (“Aardvark”, 2013/10/31)

This is the first stable release branch of NixOS.