joepie91/.md

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Original post

This is an installation walkthrough for the Nix package manager in multi-user mode, on a non-NixOS system. While the walkthrough focuses on Debian, instructions on different platforms should be similar.
1. Install dependencies.

For recent Debian:
apt-get install build-essential pkg-config autotools-dev dh-autoreconf libssl-dev libbz2-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev liblzma-dev libgc-dev libdbi-perl libdbd-sqlite3-perl libwww-curl-perl libxml2 libxslt-dev
For other distributions, look for the equivalent packages.
2. Set up build users.

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

wget http://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.11.2/nix-1.11.2.tar.xz
tar -xvf nix-1.11.2.tar.xz
cd nix-1.11.2/
./configure --enable-gc
make -j 2
make install
If you have more than two CPU cores, you might want to increase the value of the -j flag for faster compilation.
4. Create a systemd unit file, for managing the Nix daemon.

Save this as /etc/systemd/system/nix.service:
[Unit]
Description=Nix daemon

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/nix
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/nix-daemon $EXTRA_OPTS
IgnoreSIGPIPE=false
KillMode=process

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Create an empty /etc/default/nix:
touch /etc/default/nix
Enable and start the service:
systemctl enable nix
systemctl start nix
5. Set up user configuration

Source the following in your /root/.bashrc, either directly or indirectly:
nix-setup-user() {
        TARGET_USER="$1"
        SYMLINK_PATH="/home/$TARGET_USER/.nix-profile"
        PROFILE_DIR="/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$TARGET_USER"

        echo "Creating profile $PROFILE_DIR..."
        echo "Profile symlink: $SYMLINK_PATH"

        rm "$SYMLINK_PATH"
        mkdir -p "$PROFILE_DIR"
        chown "$TARGET_USER:$TARGET_USER" "$PROFILE_DIR"
        
        ln -s "$PROFILE_DIR/profile" "$SYMLINK_PATH"
        chown -h "$TARGET_USER:$TARGET_USER" "$SYMLINK_PATH"
        
        echo "export NIX_REMOTE=daemon" >> "/home/$TARGET_USER/.bashrc"
        echo ". /usr/local/etc/profile.d/nix.sh" >> "/home/$TARGET_USER/.bashrc"
        
        su -lc "cd; . /usr/local/etc/profile.d/nix.sh; NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-channel --update" "$TARGET_USER"
}
Now, whenever you create a new user - say, joepie91, you can simply do something like the following:
nix-setup-user joepie91
... and a few minutes later, joepie91 will be able to log in, and use Nix. Repeat for each user that needs access to Nix.