Nix Installation Guide

This guide describes various methods for installing Nix.

Single user install

To install Nix from any Linux distribution, use the following two commands (assumes you have the permission to use sudo and you are logged in as the user you want to install Nix for).

$ sudo install -d -m755 -o $USER -g $USER /nix
$ curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

After that being done, you can use all Nix commands as a normal user without any special permissions (for example by using sudo)

Installing without root permissions

By using nix-user-chroot or PRoot you can use Nix on systems, where you have no permission to create `/nix`. nix-user-chroot is the preferred and faster option. However it might not run on older linux kernels or kernels without user namespace support. With the following command you can test whether your system support user namespaces:

$ unshare --user --pid echo YES

The output should be YES. If the command is absent an alternative is to check the kernel compile options.

$ zgrep CONFIG_USER_NS /proc/config.gz
# On some systems like Debian or Ubuntu the kernel configuration is in a different place
$ grep CONFIG_USER_NS /boot/config-$(uname -r)

If the output of this command is CONFIG_USER_NS=y your system supports user namespaces.

nix-user-chroot

nix-user-chroot will create an environment, in which you can bind mount an directory to /nix. The mountpoint will be only visible within this environment.

nix-user-chroot can be build the following way. This assumes a c compiler and make is installed.

$ git clone https://github.com/lethalman/nix-user-chroot.git
$ cd nix-user-chroot
$ make

The last step created an executable called nix-user-chroot.

nix-user-chroot can be used to install nix. In this example the nix store will be installed to ~/.nix:

$ mkdir -m 0755 ~/.nix
$ ./nix-user-chroot/nix-user-chroot ~/.nix bash

This will start a new shell in which you can run the install script of nix:

$ curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Note that you can only use nix and the installed programs within the shell started by nix-user-chroot.

PRoot

Precompiled PRoot binaries can be downloaded from here

The following commands will install nix the nix store to ~/.nix

$ chmod +x proot_5.1.1_x86_64_rc2--no-seccomp # first make sure the executable bit is set on the binary
$ mkdir ~/.nix
$ ./proot_5.1.1_x86_64_rc2--no-seccomp ~/.nix

This will start a new shell, where nix can be installed:

$ curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Note that you can only use nix and the installed programs within the shell started by PRoot.