Its contents have been moved to the NixOS wiki here, where they are being kept up to date. Please follow the instructions there instead!
The original post is below for posterity.
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.
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-devFor other distributions, look for the equivalent packages.
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; donewget 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 installIf you have more than two CPU cores, you might want to increase the value of the -j flag for faster compilation.
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/nixEnable and start the service:
systemctl enable nix
systemctl start nixSource 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.
Try to install and run packages like a
openconnect,unetbootinor any package that requires root rights. As I seen it works incorrect.