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lix-installer/README.md
Ana Hobden d35edb976f Tidy and flesh out README
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Harmonic

Harmonic is pre-release and experimental. Don't run it on machines you care about.

Harmonic is an opinionated, experimental Nix installer.

Status

Harmonic is pre-release and experimental. It is not ready for you to use! Please don't use it on a machine you are not planning to oblierate!

Planned support:

  • Multi-user x86_64 Linux with systemd init
  • Multi-user aarch64 Linux with systemd init
  • Multi-user x86_64 MacOS
  • Single-user x86_64 Linux with systemd init
  • Single-user aarch64 Linux with systemd init
  • Multi-user aarch64 MacOS
  • Others...

Installation Differences

Differing from the current official Nix installer scripts:

  • Nix is installed with the nix-command and flakes features enabled in the nix.conf
  • Harmonic stores an installation receipt (for uninstalling) at /nix/receipt.json

Motivations

The current Nix installer scripts do an excellent job, however they are difficult to maintain. Subtle differences in the shell implementations, and certain characteristics of bash scripts make it difficult to make meaningful changes to the installer.

Our team wishes to experiment with the idea of an installer in a more structured language and see if this is a worthwhile alternative. Along the way, we are also exploring a few other ideas, such as:

  • offering users a chance to review an accurate, calculated install plan
  • keeping an installation receipt for uninstallation
  • offering users with a failing install the chance to revert
  • doing whatever tasks we can in parallel

So far, our explorations have been quite fruitful, so we wanted to share and keep exploring.

Building

Harmonic is pre-release and we do not provide binaries at this time.

Since you'll be using Harmonic to install Nix on systems without Nix, the default build is a static binary.

Build it on a system with Nix:

nix build github:determinatesystems/harmonic

Then copy the result/bin/harmonic to the machine you wish to run it on.

Running

Harmonic must be run as root or via sudo, as it needs to alter the system and cannot elevate privileges without significant complexity.

Install Nix with default options:

./harmonic

To observe verbose logging, either use harmonic -V, for extremely verbose trace logging use RUST_LOG=harmonic=trace harmonic.

Harmonic supports many of the options the current official Nix installer scripts. Review harmonic --help for details.