Installation issues: services.nix-daemon and nix.nixPath about nix-darwin HOT 6 OPEN

Note, any other miserable castaways and flotsam-dodgers on the choppy seas of nix-on-macos, you're gonna need to insert lib into the curly-brace-demarcated, comma-separated list at the beginning of your darwin-configuration.nix, if it ain't already there.

from nix-darwin.

FYI, to remove the root profile path from nix.nixPath, you must use mkForce because a change earlier this year made setting nix.nixPath merge rather than reset its entries. In your darwin-configuration.nix, add something like this:

  nix.nixPath = lib.mkForce [ "darwin-config=/configuration.nix" ... ];

As far as I can tell, this behavior is documented only in the CHANGELOG.

But while this does reset nix.nixPath, it does not change my NIX_PATH at all! Does anybody know what's going on here?

EDIT: Doing something like source ${config.system.build.setEnvironment} in my shellInit does update NIX_PATH, but surely I'm not meant to have to do that?

from nix-darwin.

Was the error message this?

error: Using the nix-daemon requires build users, aborting activation
Create the build users or disable the daemon:
$ ./bootstrap -u

or set

    services.nix-daemon.enable = false;

This is one of the checks put into place to avoid problems that are hard to recover from, at this point nothing should have happened yet. You can just edit the configuration and rebuild again if that's the case.

As for channels, that's a good point. It's probably best to extend NIX_PATH dynamically, like we do now on nixos.

from nix-darwin.

Yes, the error message was indeed the nix-daemon requires build users one. I was a bit overwhelmed with the recommendation to create them myself, as I had no idea what users to create and where to start.

If I can just restart all is fine, it's also what I did. But then I got the error with the NIX_PATH and wasn't sure whether that was due to the missing build users or the aborted install …

So it seems that technically all is well and that it was just an unfortunate combination of errors that was confusing, thanks for your help!

from nix-darwin.

Ah yes. You would have had to run the installer again if it didn't succeed the first time, that should work as expected with an existing configuration.

from nix-darwin.

I get this warning on running any darwin-* command:

warning: Nix search path entry '/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels' does not exist, ignoring

In my case this warning isn't related to the daemon, but I'm posting here because I think it's another reason the default nix.nixPath should change per the OP's suggestion.

I get the warning simply because the default Nix installation script for a single-user installation does not create a user profile for root, so the path doesn't exist. It seems clear that the nix-darwin installer should only add this path to the default nix.nixPath after checking for a multi-user Nix installation (or that the path exists).

from nix-darwin.