Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@angerman
Last active February 1, 2024 11:38
Show Gist options
  • Save angerman/cbe02d814d81a8e4d4ced56b19046c19 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save angerman/cbe02d814d81a8e4d4ced56b19046c19 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Installing nix on macOS BigSur

The nixos.org website suggests to use:

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

For macOS on Intel (x86_64) or Apple Silicon (arm64) based macs, we need to use

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume

That's it!

Now we can use nix as usual:

nix build -L '(import <nixpkgs> {}).hello.overrideAttrs (_: { HELLO = "WORLD"; })'

or

nix-shell -p haskell.compiler.ghc882

should just work.

@yisraeldov
Copy link

I got this error when it reached to the state of Creating a Nix store volume:

error: refusing to create Nix store volume because the boot volume is
       FileVault encrypted, but encryption-at-rest is not available.
       Manually create a volume for the store and re-run this script.
       See https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sect-macos-installation

@berg-austria @paulkre did you try doing what the message said and create a separate volume?

@paulkre
Copy link

paulkre commented Jul 15, 2021

I got it working eventually by running sudo diskutil apfs addVolume disk1 APFS 'Nix Store' -mountpoint /nix. But this really wasn't a nice installation experience. It would be great if Nix could take care of these low level operations behind the scenes because I have no idea what was happening when I ran this command.

@ddowding
Copy link

ddowding commented Sep 3, 2021

I got it working eventually by running sudo diskutil apfs addVolume disk1 APFS 'Nix Store' -mountpoint /nix. But this really wasn't a nice installation experience. It would be great if Nix could take care of these low level operations behind the scenes because I have no idea what was happening when I ran this command.

Thanks paulkre your command worked for me :)

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment