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.
