Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

View Ericson2314's full-sized avatar

John Ericson Ericson2314

View GitHub Profile

Multi user nix installation

Each section should be run as the user or as root, pay attention to which one!

Install nix single user

As $USER

curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
@edolstra
edolstra / nix-ui.md
Last active July 14, 2024 21:22
Nix UI

General notes

  • nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

  • By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

    @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.