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 is primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
E.g.
$ nix-build -I nixpkgs=git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs '<nixpkgs>' -A hello
This is not extremely useful yet because you can't specify a
branch/revision.
The function builtins.fetchgit fetches Git repositories at evaluation
time, similar to builtins.fetchTarball. (Perhaps the name should be
changed, being confusing with respect to Nixpkgs's fetchgit function,
with works at build time.)
Example:
(import (builtins.fetchgit git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) {}).hello
or
(import (builtins.fetchgit {
url = git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels;
rev = "nixos-16.03";
}) {}).hello
Note that the result does not contain a .git directory.
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 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", ...).
For convenience, you can now say
$ nix-env -f channel:nixos-16.03 -iA hello
instead of
$ nix-env -f https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz -iA hello
Similarly,
$ nix-shell -I channel:nixpkgs-unstable -p hello
$ nix-build channel:nixos-15.09 -A hello
Abstracting over the NixOS/Nixpkgs channels location also allows us to
use a more efficient transport (e.g. Git) in the future.
Thus, -I / $NIX_PATH entries are now downloaded only when they are
needed for evaluation. An error to download an entry is a non-fatal
warning (just like non-existant paths).
This does change the semantics of builtins.nixPath, which now returns
the original, rather than resulting path. E.g., before we had
[ { path = "/nix/store/hgm3yxf1lrrwa3z14zpqaj5p9vs0qklk-nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
but now
[ { path = "https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
Fixes#792.
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).
These are content-addressed paths or outputs of locally performed
builds. They are trusted even if they don't have signatures, so "nix
verify-paths" won't complain about them.
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
