In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.
The name had become a misnomer since it's not only for substitution
from binary caches, but when adding/copying any
(non-content-addressed) path to a store.
You can now include files via the "builders" option, using the syntax
"@<filename>". Having only one option makes it easier to override
builders completely.
For backward compatibility, the default is "@/etc/nix/machines", or
"@<filename>" for each file name in NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS.
I needed this to test ACL/xattr removal in
canonicalisePathMetaData(). Might also be useful if you need to build
old Nixpkgs that doesn't have the required patches to remove
setuid/setgid creation.
Nix can now automatically run the garbage collector during builds or
while adding paths to the store. The option "min-free = <bytes>"
specifies that Nix should run the garbage collector whenever free
space in the Nix store drops below <bytes>. It will then delete
garbage until "max-free" bytes are available.
Garbage collection during builds is asynchronous; running builds are
not paused and new builds are not blocked. However, there also is a
synchronous GC run prior to the first build/substitution.
Currently, no old GC roots are deleted (as in "nix-collect-garbage
-d").
In particular, drop the "build-" and "gc-" prefixes which are
pointless. So now you can say
nix build --no-sandbox
instead of
nix build --no-build-use-sandbox
This allows builds to call setuid binaries. This was previously
possible until we started using seccomp. Turns out that seccomp by
default disallows processes from acquiring new privileges. Generally,
any use of setuid binaries (except those created by the builder
itself) is by definition impure, but some people were relying on this
ability for certain tests.
Example:
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --no-allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 2 log lines:
cannot raise the capability into the Ambient set
: Operation not permitted
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 6 log lines:
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=15.2 ms
Fixes#1429.
This is useful for one-off situations where you want to specify a
builder on the command line instead of having to mess with
nix.machines. E.g.
$ nix-build -A hello --argstr system x86_64-darwin \
--option builders 'root@macstadium1 x86_64-darwin'
will perform the specified build on "macstadium1".
It also removes the need for a separate nix.machines file since you
can specify builders in nix.conf directly. (In fact nix.machines is
yet another hack that predates the general nix.conf configuration
file, IIRC.)
Note: this option is supported by the daemon for trusted users. The
fact that this allows trusted users to specify paths to SSH keys to
which they don't normally have access is maybe a bit too much trust...
This is to simplify remote build configuration. These environment
variables predate nix.conf.
The build hook now has a sensible default (namely build-remote).
The current load is kept in the Nix state directory now.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
This allows various Store implementations to provide different ways to
get build logs. For example, BinaryCacheStore can get the build logs
from the binary cache.
Also, remove the log-servers option since we can use substituters for
this.
Previously, the Settings class allowed other code to query for string
properties, which led to a proliferation of code all over the place making
up new options without any sort of central registry of valid options. This
commit pulls all those options back into the central Settings class and
removes the public get() methods, to discourage future abuses like that.
Furthermore, because we know the full set of options ahead of time, we
now fail loudly if someone enters an unrecognized option, thus preventing
subtle typos. With some template fun, we could probably also dump the full
set of options (with documentation, defaults, etc.) to the command line,
but I'm not doing that yet here.
If --no-build-output is given (which will become the default for the
"nix" command at least), show the last 10 lines of the build output if
the build fails.
This hook can be used to set system-specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files through the interface, but it also has full
access to the chroot root.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-support system calls. For example,
on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can reliably
be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the version the
program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do not
necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor do
their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version of
OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available. The
pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This hook can be used to set system specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-supported system calls. For
example, on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can
reliably be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the
version the program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do
not necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor
do their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version
of OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available.
The pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This is because we don't want to do HTTP requests on every evaluation,
even though we can prevent a full redownload via the cached ETag. The
default is one hour.
