A command like
$ nix run nixpkgs#hello
will now build the attribute 'packages.${system}.hello' rather than
'packages.hello'. Note that this does mean that the flake needs to
export an attribute for every system type it supports, and you can't
build on unsupported systems. So 'packages' typically looks like this:
packages = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs ["x86_64-linux" "i686-linux"] (system: {
hello = ...;
});
The 'checks', 'defaultPackage', 'devShell', 'apps' and 'defaultApp'
outputs similarly are now attrsets that map system types to
derivations/apps. 'nix flake check' checks that the derivations for
all platforms evaluate correctly, but only builds the derivations in
'checks.${system}'.
Fixes#2861. (That issue also talks about access to ~/.config/nixpkgs
and --arg, but I think it's reasonable to say that flakes shouldn't
support those.)
The alternative to attribute selection is to pass the system type as
an argument to the flake's 'outputs' function, e.g. 'outputs = { self,
nixpkgs, system }: ...'. However, that approach would be at odds with
hermetic evaluation and make it impossible to enumerate the packages
provided by a flake.
This replaces 'nix-env --set'. For example:
$ nix build --profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/system \
~/Misc/eelco-configurations:nixosConfigurations.vyr.config.system.build.toplevel
updates the NixOS system profile from a flake.
This could have been a separate command (e.g. 'nix set-profile') but
1) '--profile' is pretty similar to '--out-link'; and 2) '--profile'
could be useful for other command (like 'nix dev-shell').
This is like 'nix run', except that the command to execute is defined
in a flake output, e.g.
defaultApp = {
type = "app";
program = "${packages.blender_2_80}/bin/blender";
};
Thus you can do
$ nix app blender-bin
to start Blender from the 'blender-bin' flake.
In the future, we can extend this with sandboxing. (For example we
would want to be able to specify that Blender should not have network
access by default and should only have access to certain paths in the
user's home directory.)
Thus
$ nix dev-shell
will now build the 'provides.devShell' attribute from the flake in the
current directory. If it doesn't exist, it falls back to
'provides.defaultPackage'.
This ensures that the lock file is updated *before* evaluating it, and
that it gets updated for any nix command, not just 'nix build'.
Also, while computing the lock file, allow arbitrary registry lookups,
not just at top-level.
Also, improve some error messages slightly.
This allows using an arbitrary "provides" attribute from the specified
flake. For example:
nix build --flake nixpkgs packages.hello
(Maybe provides.packages should be used for consistency...)
This doesn't work in read-only mode, ensuring that operations like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org -S nixpkgs.hello
(asking for the closure size of nixpkgs.hello in cache.nixos.org) work
when nixpkgs.hello doesn't exist in the local store.
On second though this was annoying. E.g. "nix log nixpkgs.hello" would
build/download Hello first, even though the log can be fetched
directly from the binary cache.
May need to revisit this.
This allows commands like 'nix path-info', 'nix copy', 'nix verify'
etc. to work on arbitrary installables. E.g. to copy geeqie to a
binary cache:
$ nix copy -r --to file:///tmp/binary-cache nixpkgs.geeqie
Or to get the closure size of thunderbird:
$ nix path-info -S nixpkgs.thunderbird