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* Overview of nix-env. Recommended reading. :-)

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Eelco Dolstra 2003-11-26 16:09:27 +00:00
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<title>Basic package management</title>
<para>
Let's start from the perspective of an end-user. Common operations at
Let's start from the perspective of an end user. Common operations at
this level are to install and remove packages, ask what packages are
installed or available for installation, and so on.
installed or available for installation, and so on. These are operations
on the <emphasis>user environment</emphasis>: the set of packages that a
user <quote>sees</quote>. In a command line Unix environment, this means
the set of programs that are available through the
<literal>PATH</literal> environment variable. (In other environments it
might mean the set of programs available on the desktop, through the
start menu, and so on.)
</para>
<para>
The terms <quote>installation</quote> and <quote>uninstallation</quote>
are used in this context to denote the act of adding or removing packages
from the user environment. In Nix, these operations are dissociated from
the physical copying or deleting of files. Installation requires that
the files constituting the package are present, but they may be present
beforehand. Likewise, uninstallation does not actually delete any files;
this is done automatically by running a garbage collector.
</para>
<para>
User environments are manipulated through the <command>nix-env</command>
command. The query operation can be used to see what packages are
currently installed.
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env -q
MozillaFirebird-0.7
sylpheed-0.9.7
pan-0.14.2</screen>
<para>
(<option>-q</option> is actually short for <option>--query
--installed</option>.) The package names are symbolic: they don't have
any particular significance to Nix (as they shouldn't, since they are not
unique&mdash;there can be many derivations with the same name). Note that
these packages have many dependencies (e.g., Mozilla uses the
<literal>gtk+</literal> package) but these have not been installed in the
user environment, though they are present on the system. Generally,
there is no need to install such packages; only packages containing
programs should be installed.
</para>
<para>
To install packages, a <emphasis>Nix expression</emphasis> is required
that tells Nix how to build that package. There is a <ulink
url='https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/dist/trace/trace-nixpkgs-trunk.tar.bz2'>standard
distribution of Nix expressions</ulink> for many common packages.
url='https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/dist/trace/trace-nixpkgs-trunk.tar.bz2'>set
of standard of Nix expressions</ulink> for many common packages.
Assuming that you have downloaded and unpacked these, you can view the
set of available packages:
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env -qf pkgs/system/i686-suse-linux.nix
gettext-0.12.1
sylpheed-0.9.7
aterm-2.0
gtk+-1.2.10
apache-httpd-2.0.48
pan-0.14.2
...</screen>
<para>
The Nix expression in the file <filename>i686-suse-linux.nix</filename>
yields the set of packages for a SuSE Linux system running on x86
hardware. For other platforms, copy and modify this file for your
platform as appropriate. [TODO: improve this]
</para>
<para>
It is also possible to see the <emphasis>status</emphasis> of available
packages, i.e., whether they are installed into the user environment
and/or present in the system:
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env -qf pkgs/system/i686-suse-linux.nix
-P gettext-0.12.1
IP sylpheed-0.9.7
-- aterm-2.0
-P gtk+-1.2.10</screen>
<para>
This reveals that the <literal>sylpheed</literal> package is already
installed, or more precisely, that exactly the same instantiation of
<literal>sylpheed</literal> is installed. This guarantees that the
available package is exactly the same as the installed package with
regard to sources, dependencies, build flags, and so on. Similarly, we
see that the <literal>gettext</literal> and <literal>gtk+</literal>
packages are present but not installed in the user environment, while the
<literal>aterm</literal> package is not installed or present at all (so,
if we were to install it, it would have to be built or downloaded first).
</para>
<para>
The install operation is used install available packages from a Nix
environment. To install the <literal>pan</literal> package (a
newsreader), you would do:
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env -i pkgs/system/i686-suse-linux.nix pan-0.14.2</screen>
<para>
Since installation may take a long time, depending on whether any
packages need to be built or downloaded, it's a good idea to make
<command>nix-env</command> run verbosely by using the <option>-v</option>
(<option>--verbose</option>) option. This option may be repeated to
increase the level of verbosity. A good value is 3
(<option>-vvv</option>).
</para>
<para>
In fact, if you run this command verbosely you will observe that Nix
starts to build many packages, including large and fundamental ones such
as <literal>glibc</literal> and <literal>gcc</literal>. I.e., you are
performing a source installation. This is generally undesirable, since
installation from sources may require large amounts of disk and CPU
resources. Therefore a <quote>binary</quote> installation is generally
preferable.
</para>
<para>
Rather than provide different mechanisms to create and perform
the installation of binary packages, Nix supports binary deployment
<emphasis>transparently</emphasis> through a generic mechanism of
<emphasis>substitute expressions</emphasis>. If an request is made to
build some Nix expression, Nix will first try to build any substitutes
for that expression. These substitutes presumably perform an identical
build operation with respect to the result, but require less resources.
For instance, a substitute that downloads a pre-built package from the
network requires less CPU and disk resources, and possibly less time.
</para>
<para>
Nix's use of cryptographic hashes makes this entirely safe. It is not
possible, for instance, to accidentally substitute a build of some
package for a Solaris or Windows system for a build on a SuSE/x86 system.
</para>
<para>
While the substitute mechanism is a generic mechanism, Nix provides two
standard tools called <command>nix-push</command> and
<command>nix-push</command> that maintain and use a shared cache of
prebuilt derivations on some network site (reachable through HTTP). If
you attempt to install some package that someone else has previously
built and <quote>pushed</quote> into the cache, and you have done a
<quote>pull</quote> to register substitutes that download these prebuilt
packages, then the installation will automatically use these.
</para>
<para>
For example, to pull from our <ulink
url='http://losser.st-lab.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/nix-dist/'>cache</ulink> of
prebuilt packages (at the time of writing, for SuSE Linux/x86), use the
following command:
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-pull http://losser.st-lab.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/nix-dist/
obtaining list of Nix archives at http://losser.st-lab.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/nix-dist...
...</screen>
<para>
If <command>nix-pull</command> is run without any arguments, it will pull
from the URLs specified in the file
<filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/etc/nix/prebuilts.conf</filename>.
</para>
<para>
Assuming that the <literal>pan</literal> installation produced no errors,
it can be used immediately, that is, it now appears in a directory in the
<literal>PATH</literal> environment variable. Specifically,
<literal>PATH</literal> includes the entry
<filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/var/nix/links/current/bin</filename>,
where
<filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/var/nix/links/current</filename>
is just a symlink to the current user environment:
</para>
<screen>
$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/links/
...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eelco ... 15 -> /nix/store/1871...12b0-user-environment
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eelco ... 16 -> /nix/store/59ba...df6b-user-environment
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eelco ... current -> /nix/var/nix/links/16</screen>
<para>
That is, <filename>current</filename> in this example is a link to
<filename>16</filename>, which is the current user environment. Before
the installation, it pointed to <filename>15</filename>. Note that this
means that you can atomically roll-back to the previous user environment
by pointing the symlink <filename>current</filename> at
<filename>15</filename> again. This also shows that operations such as
installation are atomic in the Nix system: any arbitrarily complex
set of installation, uninstallation, or upgrade actions eventually boil
down to the single operation of pointing a symlink somewhere else (which
can be implemented atomically in Unix).
</para>
<para>
What's in a user environment? It's just a set of symlinks to the files
that constitute the installed packages. For instance:
</para>
<screen>
$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/links/16/bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eelco ... MozillaFirebird -> /nix/store/35f8...4ae6-MozillaFirebird-0.7/bin/MozillaFirebird
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eelco ... svn -> /nix/store/3829...fb5d-subversion-0.32.1/bin/svn
...</screen>
<para>
Note that, e.g., <filename>svn</filename> =
<filename>/nix/var/nix/links/current/bin/svn</filename> =
<filename>/nix/var/nix/links/16/bin/svn</filename> =
<filename>/nix/store/59ba...df6b-user-environment/bin/svn</filename> =
<filename>/nix/store/3829...fb5d-subversion-0.32.1/bin/svn</filename>.
</para>
<para>
Naturally, packages can also be uninstalled:
</para>
<screen>
$ nix-env -u pan-0.14.2</screen>
</sect1>
</chapter>