This is useful for testing commands in isolation.
For example,
$ nix run nixpkgs.geeqie -i -k DISPLAY -k XAUTHORITY -c geeqie
runs geeqie in an empty environment, except for $DISPLAY and
$XAUTHORITY.
E.g.
nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello --greeting Hallo
Note that unlike "nix-shell --command", no quoting of arguments is
necessary.
"-c" (short for "--command") cannot be combined with "--" because they
both consume all remaining arguments. But since installables shouldn't
start with a dash, this is unlikely to cause problems.
Running "nix run" with a diverted store, e.g.
$ nix run --store local?root=/tmp/nix nixpkgs.hello
stopped working when Nix became multithreaded, because
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) doesn't work in multithreaded processes. The
obvious solution is to terminate all other threads first, but 1) there
is no way to terminate Boehm GC marker threads; and 2) it appears that
the kernel has a race where unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) will still fail for
some indeterminate amount of time after joining other threads.
So instead, "nix run" will now exec() a single-threaded helper ("nix
__run_in_chroot") that performs the actual unshare()/chroot()/exec().
The package list is now cached in
~/.cache/nix/package-search.json. This gives a substantial speedup to
"nix search" queries. For example (on an SSD):
First run: (no package search cache, cold page cache)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m6.516s
Second run: (package search cache populated)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m0.143s
This doesn't work in read-only mode, ensuring that operations like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org -S nixpkgs.hello
(asking for the closure size of nixpkgs.hello in cache.nixos.org) work
when nixpkgs.hello doesn't exist in the local store.
On second though this was annoying. E.g. "nix log nixpkgs.hello" would
build/download Hello first, even though the log can be fetched
directly from the binary cache.
May need to revisit this.
Thus, instead of ‘--option <name> <value>’, you can write ‘--<name>
<value>’. So
--option http-connections 100
becomes
--http-connections 100
Apart from brevity, the difference is that it's not an error to set a
non-existent option via --option, but unrecognized arguments are
fatal.
Boolean options have special treatment: they're mapped to the
argument-less flags ‘--<name>’ and ‘--no-<name>’. E.g.
--option auto-optimise-store false
becomes
--no-auto-optimise-store
This is a little convenience command that opens the Nix expression of
the specified package. For example,
nix edit nixpkgs.perlPackages.Moose
opens <nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/perl-packages.nix> in $EDITOR (at the
right line number for some editors).
This requires the package to have a meta.position attribute.
So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
Thus
$ nix build -f foo.nix
will build foo.nix.
And
$ nix build
will build default.nix. However, this may not be a good idea because
it's kind of inconsistent, given that "nix build foo" will build the
"foo" attribute from the default installation source (i.e. the
synthesis of $NIX_PATH), rather than ./default.nix. So I may revert
this.
This allows commands like 'nix path-info', 'nix copy', 'nix verify'
etc. to work on arbitrary installables. E.g. to copy geeqie to a
binary cache:
$ nix copy -r --to file:///tmp/binary-cache nixpkgs.geeqie
Or to get the closure size of thunderbird:
$ nix path-info -S nixpkgs.thunderbird
This writes info about every path in the closure in the same format as
‘nix path-info --json’. Thus it also includes NAR hashes and sizes.
Example:
[
{
"path": "/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"narHash": "sha256:0ckdc4z20kkmpqdilx0wl6cricxv90lh85xpv2qljppcmz6vzcxl",
"narSize": 197648,
"references": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20939776
},
{
"path": "/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24",
"narHash": "sha256:1nfn3m3p98y1c0kd0brp80dn9n5mycwgrk183j17rajya0h7gax3",
"narSize": 20742128,
"references": [
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20742128
}
]
Fixes#1134.
That is, unless --file is specified, the Nix search path is
synthesized into an attribute set. Thus you can say
$ nix build nixpkgs.hello
assuming $NIX_PATH contains an entry of the form "nixpkgs=...". This
is more verbose than
$ nix build hello
but is less ambiguous.
This is a convenience command to allow users who are not privileged to
create /nix/store to use Nix with regular binary caches. For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=$HOME/nix/var&real=/$HOME/nix/store" nix run firefox bashInteractive
will download Firefox and bash from cache.nixos.org, then start a
shell in which $HOME/nix/store is mounted on /nix/store.
This replaces nix-push. For example,
$ nix copy --to file:///tmp/cache -r $(type -p firefox)
copies the closure of firefox to the specified binary cache. And
$ nix copy --from file:///tmp/cache --to s3://my-cache /nix/store/abcd...
copies between two binary caches.
It will also replace nix-copy-closure, once we have an SSHStore class,
e.g.
$ nix copy --from ssh://alice@machine /nix/store/abcd...
This allows commands like "nix verify --all" or "nix path-info --all"
to work on S3 caches.
Unfortunately, this requires some ugly hackery: when querying the
contents of the bucket, we don't want to have to read every .narinfo
file. But the S3 bucket keys only include the hash part of each store
path, not the name part. So as a special exception
queryAllValidPaths() can now return store paths *without* the name
part, and queryPathInfo() accepts such store paths (returning a
ValidPathInfo object containing the full name).
Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
"verify-store" is now simply an "--all" flag to "nix verify". This
flag can be used for any other store path command as well (e.g. "nix
path-info", "nix copy-sigs", ...).
This specifies the number of distinct signatures required to consider
each path "trusted".
Also renamed ‘--no-sigs’ to ‘--no-trust’ for the flag that disables
verifying whether a path is trusted (since a path can also be trusted
if it has no signatures, but was built locally).
Typical usage is to check local paths using the signatures from a
binary cache:
$ nix verify-paths -r /run/current-system -s https://cache.nixos.org
path ‘/nix/store/c1k4zqfb74wba5sn4yflb044gvap0x6k-nixos-system-mandark-16.03.git.fc2d7a5M’ is untrusted
...
checked 844 paths, 119 untrusted
Unlike "nix-store --verify-path", this command verifies signatures in
addition to store path contents, is multi-threaded (especially useful
when verifying binary caches), and has a progress indicator.
Example use:
$ nix verify-paths --store https://cache.nixos.org -r $(type -p thunderbird)
...
[17/132 checked] checking ‘/nix/store/rawakphadqrqxr6zri2rmnxh03gqkrl3-autogen-5.18.6’
For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE=file:///my-cache nix ls-store -lR /nix/store/f4kbgl8shhyy76rkk3nbxr0lz8d2ip7q-binutils-2.23.1
dr-xr-xr-x 0 ./bin
-r-xr-xr-x 30748 ./bin/addr2line
-r-xr-xr-x 66973 ./bin/ar
...
Similarly, "nix ls-nar" lists the contents of a NAR file, "nix
cat-nar" extracts a file from a NAR file, and "nix cat-store" extract
a file from a Nix store.
