this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Nix / NixOS
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It'd help if you mentioned the package itself.
Let's say you wanted to install neovim, there are many similar packages available, viz. neovim, neovim-gtk, neovim-qt, etc. they all have description and most packages have link to homepage, hinting their purpose. But you can ignore *-unwrapped packages if you are not packaging yourself.
This seems like packaging problem, most of the time it works. If not, notifying the maintainers via issues could help or you'll have to fix it for yourself or use other package manager.
Go to package homepage if available and check their releases and compare them with version shown on search.nixos.org. If homepage is not available, go to source and get the url from src attribute and check the original source and compare with version shown on search.nixos.org.
You can check the commit history for the "source" file. Also you can update it yourself. If you're lucky and know nix, then you'll only have to update the url/version and hash like here.
you can checkout https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_command and may be https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.18/. Unfortunately I can't find an comprehensive guideline for begineers. Others can chime in if they know.
Notice about experimental features nix-command and flakes.
If you see documentations other official sources, most often they'll use flakes/nix-command but since they're not officially stabilised (not as in broken) yet, documentation/blogs may vary. This can be quite frustrating if you don't know about it.
Without flakes/nix-command, to install (let's say) neovim on non-NixOS distro
nix-env -iA nixos.neovim
, you can see that when search on search.nixos.org and click on the required packages, then choose one of the three tabs: nix-env, nix-shell or NixOS-configuration.nix-env installs the packages in your user environment, you can rollback and stuff.
nix-shell downloads the package and spawns a new shell (your shell prompt changes to [nix-shell]:) and you can use the package there and package won't be installed. This is good for trying packages before installing.
For using flakes/nix-command, first you'll have to enable them otherwise you'll get this error
you can append
--extra-experimental-features nix-command
to the above commandnix shell nixpkgs#neovim --extra-experimental-features nix-command
and it'll work temporarily.OR
Append this line
experimental-features = nix-command flakes
to /etc/nix/nix.conf to enablenix-command
andflakes
.nix shell nixpkgs#neovim
is equivalent tonix-shell -p neovim
though in the former it's using nixpkgs-unstable branch of github.com/nixos/nixpkgs.nix profile install nixpkgs#neovim
is equivalent tonix-env -iA nixos.neovim
though it's said to stop using nix-envPS: This could be more comprehensive, my writing skills are shit lol
I had trouble with at least
julia
rstudio
andzed
which is why I didn't specify the specific package and would like to know how to solve it in general.Thanks for your write up! It gives me a better understanding of it! But I guess the only thing that I can do now is to raise issues when the package doesn't work properly :D
I solved it using distrobox but I'd prefer using nix
Ah, I forgot to mention that you can ask for help on https://discourse.nixos.org/ , you'll get better reach there. It has helped me a lot since I started with nix
just to clarify. Shall I open an issue or send an email to the maintainer when a package is outdated, or not working?
open an issue I guess? I'm not sure