Installing a Binary Distribution
To install the latest version Nix, run the following command:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
This performs the default type of installation for your platform:
- Multi-user:
- Linux with systemd and without SELinux
- macOS
- Single-user:
- Linux without systemd
- Linux with SELinux
We recommend the multi-user installation if it supports your platform and you can authenticate with sudo
.
The installer can configured with various command line arguments and environment variables. To show available command line flags:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh -s -- --help
To check what it does and how it can be customised further, download and edit the second-stage installation script.
Installing a pinned Nix version from a URL
Version-specific installation URLs for all Nix versions since 1.11.16 can be found at releases.nixos.org. The directory for each version contains the corresponding SHA-256 hash.
All installation scripts are invoked the same way:
$ export VERSION=2.19.2
$ curl -L https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/install | sh
Multi User Installation
The multi-user Nix installation creates system users and a system service for the Nix daemon.
Supported systems:
- Linux running systemd, with SELinux disabled
- macOS
To explicitly instruct the installer to perform a multi-user installation on your system:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh -s -- --daemon
You can run this under your usual user account or root
.
The script will invoke sudo
as needed.
Single User Installation
To explicitly select a single-user installation on your system:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh -s -- --no-daemon
In a single-user installation, /nix
is owned by the invoking user.
The script will invoke sudo
to create /nix
if it doesn’t already exist.
If you don’t have sudo
, manually create /nix
as root
:
$ su root
# mkdir /nix
# chown alice /nix
Installing from a binary tarball
You can also download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies:
- Choose a version and system type
- Download and unpack the tarball
- Run the installer
Example
$ pushd $(mktemp -d) $ export VERSION=2.19.2 $ export SYSTEM=x86_64-linux $ curl -LO https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz $ tar xfj nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz $ cd nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM $ ./install $ popd
The installer can be customised with the environment variables declared in the file named install-multi-user
.
Native packages for Linux distributions
The Nix community maintains installers for some Linux distributions in their native packaging format(https://nix-community.github.io/nix-installers/).
macOS Installation
We believe we have ironed out how to cleanly support the read-only root file system on modern macOS. New installs will do this automatically.
This section previously detailed the situation, options, and trade-offs, but it now only outlines what the installer does. You don't need to know this to run the installer, but it may help if you run into trouble:
- create a new APFS volume for your Nix store
- update
/etc/synthetic.conf
to direct macOS to create a "synthetic" empty root directory to mount your volume - specify mount options for the volume in
/etc/fstab
rw
: read-writenoauto
: prevent the system from auto-mounting the volume (so the LaunchDaemon mentioned below can control mounting it, and to avoid masking problems with that mounting service).nobrowse
: prevent the Nix Store volume from showing up on your desktop; also keeps Spotlight from spending resources to index this volume
- if you have FileVault enabled
- generate an encryption password
- put it in your system Keychain
- use it to encrypt the volume
- create a system LaunchDaemon to mount this volume early enough in the boot process to avoid problems loading or restoring any programs that need access to your Nix store