lix/src/nix/show-derivation.md
Valentin Gagarin 2af9fd20c6 clarify definition of "installable"
the term was hard to discover, as its definition and explanation were in
a very long document lacking an overview section.
search did not help because it occurs so often.

- clarify wording in the definition
- add an overview of installable types
- add "installable" to glossary
- link to definition from occurrences of the term
- be more precise about where store derivation outputs are processed
- installable Nix expressions must evaluate to a derivation

Co-authored-by: Adam Joseph <54836058+amjoseph-nixpkgs@users.noreply.github.com>
2023-03-05 01:46:17 +01:00

3.1 KiB

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Examples

  • Show the store derivation that results from evaluating the Hello package:

    # nix show-derivation nixpkgs#hello
    {
      "/nix/store/s6rn4jz1sin56rf4qj5b5v8jxjm32hlk-hello-2.10.drv": {
      }
    }
    
  • Show the full derivation graph (if available) that produced your NixOS system:

    # nix show-derivation -r /run/current-system
    
  • Print all files fetched using fetchurl by Firefox's dependency graph:

    # nix show-derivation -r nixpkgs#firefox \
      | jq -r '.[] | select(.outputs.out.hash and .env.urls) | .env.urls' \
      | uniq | sort
    

    Note that .outputs.out.hash selects fixed-output derivations (derivations that produce output with a specified content hash), while .env.urls selects derivations with a urls attribute.

Description

This command prints on standard output a JSON representation of the store derivations to which installables evaluate. Store derivations are used internally by Nix. They are store paths with extension .drv that represent the build-time dependency graph to which a Nix expression evaluates.

By default, this command only shows top-level derivations, but with --recursive, it also shows their dependencies.

The JSON output is a JSON object whose keys are the store paths of the derivations, and whose values are a JSON object with the following fields:

  • outputs: Information about the output paths of the derivation. This is a JSON object with one member per output, where the key is the output name and the value is a JSON object with these fields:

    • path: The output path.
    • hashAlgo: For fixed-output derivations, the hashing algorithm (e.g. sha256), optionally prefixed by r: if hash denotes a NAR hash rather than a flat file hash.
    • hash: For fixed-output derivations, the expected content hash in base-16.

    Example:

    "outputs": {
      "out": {
        "path": "/nix/store/2543j7c6jn75blc3drf4g5vhb1rhdq29-source",
        "hashAlgo": "r:sha256",
        "hash": "6fc80dcc62179dbc12fc0b5881275898f93444833d21b89dfe5f7fbcbb1d0d62"
      }
    }
    
  • inputSrcs: A list of store paths on which this derivation depends.

  • inputDrvs: A JSON object specifying the derivations on which this derivation depends, and what outputs of those derivations. For example,

    "inputDrvs": {
      "/nix/store/6lkh5yi7nlb7l6dr8fljlli5zfd9hq58-curl-7.73.0.drv": ["dev"],
      "/nix/store/fn3kgnfzl5dzym26j8g907gq3kbm8bfh-unzip-6.0.drv": ["out"]
    }
    

    specifies that this derivation depends on the dev output of curl, and the out output of unzip.

  • system: The system type on which this derivation is to be built (e.g. x86_64-linux).

  • builder: The absolute path of the program to be executed to run the build. Typically this is the bash shell (e.g. /nix/store/r3j288vpmczbl500w6zz89gyfa4nr0b1-bash-4.4-p23/bin/bash).

  • args: The command-line arguments passed to the builder.

  • env: The environment passed to the builder.

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