Basic Package Management
Warning
FIXME(Lix): This section does not document the most common modern practices in terms of avoiding channels, pinning, declarative software installation (see flakey-profile or home-manager or NixOS), or using flakes, etc. It is, however, likely correct at a technical level.
For more information on modern practices, see the resources page on the Lix site.
The main command for package management is
nix-env. You can use it to install,
upgrade, and erase packages, and to query what packages are installed
or are available for installation.
In Nix systems, different users can have different “views” on the set of
installed applications. That is, there might be lots of applications
present on the system (possibly in many different versions), but users
can have a specific selection of those active — where “active” just
means that it appears in a directory in the user’s PATH. Such a view
on the set of installed applications is called a user environment,
which is just a directory tree consisting of symlinks to the files of
the active applications.
Components are installed from a set of Nix expressions that tell Lix how to build those packages, including, if necessary, their dependencies. There is a very large collection of Nix expressions called the Nixpkgs package collection that contains packages ranging from basic development stuff such as GCC and Glibc, to end-user applications like Mozilla Firefox. (Lix is however not tied to the Nixpkgs package collection; you could write your own Nix expressions based on Nixpkgs, or completely new ones.)
You can manually download the latest version of Nixpkgs from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs. However, it’s much more convenient to use the Nixpkgs channel, since it makes it easy to stay up to date with new versions of Nixpkgs. Nixpkgs is automatically added to your list of “subscribed” channels when you install Lix. If this is not the case for some reason, you can add it as follows:
$ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
$ nix-channel --update
Note
On NixOS, you’re automatically subscribed to a NixOS channel corresponding to your NixOS major release (e.g. http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-21.11). A NixOS channel is identical to the Nixpkgs channel, except that it contains only Linux binaries and is updated only if a set of regression tests succeed.
You can view the set of available packages in Nixpkgs:
$ nix-env --query --available --attr-path
nixpkgs.aterm aterm-2.2
nixpkgs.bash bash-3.0
nixpkgs.binutils binutils-2.15
nixpkgs.bison bison-1.875d
nixpkgs.blackdown blackdown-1.4.2
nixpkgs.bzip2 bzip2-1.0.2
…
The flag -q specifies a query operation, -a means that you want
to show the “available” (i.e., installable) packages, as opposed to the
installed packages, and -P prints the attribute paths that can be used
to unambiguously select a package for installation (listed in the first column).
If you downloaded Nixpkgs yourself, or if you checked it out from GitHub,
then you need to pass the path to your Nixpkgs tree using the -f flag:
$ nix-env --query --available --attr-path --file /path/to/nixpkgs
aterm aterm-2.2
bash bash-3.0
…
where /path/to/nixpkgs is where you’ve unpacked or checked out Nixpkgs.
You can filter the packages by name:
$ nix-env --query --available --attr-path firefox
nixpkgs.firefox-esr firefox-91.3.0esr
nixpkgs.firefox firefox-94.0.1
and using regular expressions:
$ nix-env --query --available --attr-path 'firefox.*'
It is also possible to see the status of available packages, i.e., whether they are installed into the user environment and/or present in the system:
$ nix-env --query --available --attr-path --status
…
-PS nixpkgs.bash bash-3.0
--S nixpkgs.binutils binutils-2.15
IPS nixpkgs.bison bison-1.875d
…
The first character (I) indicates whether the package is installed in
your current user environment. The second (P) indicates whether it is
present on your system (in which case installing it into your user
environment would be a very quick operation). The last one (S)
indicates whether there is a so-called substitute for the package,
which is Nix’s mechanism for doing binary deployment. It just means that
Lix knows that it can fetch a pre-built package from somewhere
(typically a network server) instead of building it locally.
You can install a package using nix-env --install --attr. For instance,
$ nix-env --install --attr nixpkgs.subversion
will install the package called subversion from nixpkgs channel (which is, of course, the
Subversion version management system).
Note
When you ask Lix to install a package, it will first try to get it in
pre-compiled form from a binary cache. By default, Lix will use the
binary cache https://cache.nixos.org; it contains binaries for most
packages in Nixpkgs. Only if no binary is available in the binary
cache, Lix will build the package from source. So if nix-env
-iA nixpkgs.subversion results in Lix building stuff from source, then either
the package is not built for your platform by the Nixpkgs build
servers, or your version of Nixpkgs is too old or too new. For
instance, if you have a very recent checkout of Nixpkgs, then the
Nixpkgs build servers may not have had a chance to build everything
and upload the resulting binaries to https://cache.nixos.org. The
Nixpkgs channel is only updated after all binaries have been uploaded
to the cache, so if you stick to the Nixpkgs channel (rather than
using a Git checkout of the Nixpkgs tree), you will get binaries for
most packages.
Naturally, packages can also be uninstalled. Unlike when installing, you will
need to use the derivation name (though the version part can be omitted),
instead of the attribute path, as nix-env does not record which attribute
was used for installing:
$ nix-env --uninstall subversion
Upgrading to a new version is just as easy. If you have a new release of nixpkgs, you can do:
$ nix-env --upgrade --attr nixpkgs.subversion
This will only upgrade Subversion if there is a “newer” version in the
new set of Nix expressions, as defined by some pretty arbitrary rules
regarding ordering of version numbers (which generally do what you’d
expect of them). To just unconditionally replace Subversion with
whatever version is in the Nix expressions, use -i instead of -u;
-i will remove whatever version is already installed.
You can also upgrade all packages for which there are newer versions:
$ nix-env --upgrade
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to ask what nix-env would do, without
actually doing it. For instance, to find out what packages would be
upgraded by nix-env --upgrade, you can do
$ nix-env --upgrade --dry-run
(dry run; not doing anything)
upgrading `libxslt-1.1.0' to `libxslt-1.1.10'
upgrading `graphviz-1.10' to `graphviz-1.12'
upgrading `coreutils-5.0' to `coreutils-5.2.1'