How to fetch Nixpkgs with an empty NIX PATH

This recipe provides a way to fetch Nixpkgs with an empty NIX_PATH. This comes in handy if you want to remove impure references to the NIX_PATH from your code base

Save the following code to a fetchNixpkgs.nix file within your project:

{ rev, sha256 }:

if 0 <= builtins.compareVersions builtins.nixVersion "1.12"
then

builtins.fetchTarball {
  url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${rev}.tar.gz";
  inherit sha256;
}

else

# `builtins.fetchTarball` only accepts a `sha256` argument in Nix version 1.12 or later
with rec {
  system = builtins.currentSystem;

  tarball = import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${rev}.tar.gz";
    inherit sha256;
  };

  builtin-paths = import <nix/config.nix>;

  script = builtins.toFile "nixpkgs-unpacker" ''
    "$coreutils/mkdir" "$out"
    cd "$out"
    "$gzip" --decompress < "$tarball" | "$tar" --extract --strip-components=1
  '';

  nixpkgs = builtins.derivation {
    name = "nixpkgs-${builtins.substring 0 6 rev}";

    builder = builtins.storePath builtin-paths.shell;

    args = [ script ];

    inherit tarball system;

    tar = builtins.storePath builtin-paths.tar;
    gzip = builtins.storePath builtin-paths.gzip;
    coreutils = builtins.storePath builtin-paths.coreutils;
  };
};

nixpkgs

... and then you can use the saved file to fetch Nixpkgs like this:

let
  fetchNixpkgs = import ./fetchNixpkgs.nix;

  nixpkgs = fetchNixpkgs {
     rev = "76d649b59484607901f0c1b8f737d8376a904019";

     sha256 = "01c2f4mj4ahir0sxk9kxbymg2pki1pc9a3y6r9x6ridry75fzb8h";
  };

  pkgs = import nixpkgs { config = {}; };

in
  ...