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                             # The Git revision of nixpkgs to fetch
, sha256                          # The SHA256 hash of the unpacked archive
, system ? builtins.currentSystem # This is overridable if necessary
}:

if (0 <= builtins.compareVersions builtins.nixVersion "1.12")

# In Nix 1.12, we can just give a `sha256` to `builtins.fetchTarball`.
then (
  builtins.fetchTarball {
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${rev}.tar.gz";
    inherit sha256;
  })

# This hack should at least work for Nix 1.11
else (
  (rec {
    tarball = import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
      url    = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${rev}.tar.gz";
      sha256 = null;
    };

    builtin-paths = import <nix/config.nix>;
      
    script = builtins.toFile "nixpkgs-unpacker" ''
      "$coreutils/mkdir" "$out"
      cd "$out"
      "$gzip" --decompress < "$tarball" | "$tar" -x --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;
    } // (if null == sha256 then { } else {
      outputHashMode = "recursive";
      outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
      outputHash = sha256;
    }));
  }).nixpkgs)

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

let
  fetchNixpkgs = import ./fetchNixpkgs.nix;

  nixpkgs = fetchNixpkgs {
    rev    = "3389f23412877913b9d22a58dfb241684653d7e9";
    sha256 = "0wgm7sk9fca38a50hrsqwz6q79z35gqgb9nw80xz7pfdr4jy9pf8";
  };

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

in
  ...

If you do not need to support Nix versions earlier than 2.0, then you can simplify fetchNixpkgs.nix to:

{ rev    # The Git revision of nixpkgs to fetch
, sha256 # The SHA256 hash of the unpacked archive
}:

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

... or you can use builtins.fetchTarball directly instead of fetchNixpkgs.nix:

let
  nixpkgs = builtins.fetchTarball {
    url    = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/3389f23412877913b9d22a58dfb241684653d7e9.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "0wgm7sk9fca38a50hrsqwz6q79z35gqgb9nw80xz7pfdr4jy9pf8";
  };

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

in
  ...

You can use the following command to obtain the correct SHA256 hash to supply to the above utilities:

$ nix-prefetch-url --unpack "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${REVISION}.tar.gz"