4 ms·

I think he may be referring to installing Nix itself, which does require root even if the intention isn't to install anything system-wide. I did once think abou

I think he may be referring to installing Nix itself, which does require root even if the intention isn't to install anything system-wide. I did once think about modifying the nix installer to let me set an arbitrary nix store because I wanted nix packages in a docker container I was debugging, but never really got around to it. Let me know if you know of somebody else who tried this.

iFreilicht 3y ago
So this is possible, but there are a lot of caveats. First, the installer itself explicitly says: ``` # Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the # default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it. readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix" ``` I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1] However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part. So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios. You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself. [1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.html?highlight=NIX_STORE#env-NIX_STORE_DIR https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.h... (you can also relocate most other directories. The `prefix` in the paths is `/nix`)
- bshacklett 3y ago
  Now that's interesting. I use Homebrew in a similar way. It does mean I have to compile a lot of things from scratch, but Homebrew has knowledge of which packages are relocatable and which aren't, so I get to use binary "bottles" for about 25% of the packages I install. I'll have to give this a try.

iFreilicht 3y ago

So this is possible, but there are a lot of caveats. First, the installer itself explicitly says: ``` # Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the # default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it. readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix" ``` I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1] However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part. So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios. You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself. [1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.html?highlight=NIX_STORE#env-NIX_STORE_DIR https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.h... (you can also relocate most other directories. The `prefix` in the paths is `/nix`)

bshacklett 3y ago
Now that's interesting. I use Homebrew in a similar way. It does mean I have to compile a lot of things from scratch, but Homebrew has knowledge of which packages are relocatable and which aren't, so I get to use binary "bottles" for about 25% of the packages I install. I'll have to give this a try.