breakpointHook

This hook will make a build pause instead of stopping when a failure happens. It prevents nix from cleaning up the build environment immediately and allows the user to attach to a build environment using the cntr command. Upon build error it will print instructions on how to use cntr, which can be used to enter the environment for debugging. Installing cntr and running the command will provide shell access to the build sandbox of failed build. At /var/lib/cntr the sandboxed filesystem is mounted. All commands and files of the system are still accessible within the shell. To execute commands from the sandbox use the cntr exec subcommand. cntr is only supported on Linux-based platforms. To use it first add cntr to your environment.systemPackages on NixOS or alternatively to the root user on non-NixOS systems. Then in the package that is supposed to be inspected, add breakpointHook to nativeBuildInputs.

{
  nativeBuildInputs = [ breakpointHook ];
}

When a build failure happens there will be an instruction printed that shows how to attach with cntr to the build sandbox.

Note

Caution with remote builds

This won’t work with remote builds as the build environment is on a different machine and can’t be accessed by cntr. Remote builds can be turned off by setting --option builders '' for nix-build or --builders '' for nix build.