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GNU Guix (IPA: ɡiːks) is a purely functional package manager, and associated free software distribution, for the GNU system. In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection.
It provides Guile Scheme APIs, including a high-level embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs) to describe how packages are to be built and composed.
GNU Guix can be used on top of an already-installed GNU/Linux distribution, or it can be used standalone (we call that “Guix System”).
Guix is based on the Nix package manager.
GNU Guix currently depends on the following packages:
- GNU Guile 2.2.x
- Guile-Gcrypt 0.1.0 or later
- GNU Make
- GnuTLS compiled with guile support enabled
- Guile-SQLite3, version 0.1.0 or later
- Guile-Git
- zlib
- Guile-JSON
Unless `–disable-daemon’ was passed, the following packages are needed:
- GNU libgcrypt
- SQLite 3
- GCC’s g++
- optionally libbz2
When `–disable-daemon’ was passed, you instead need the following:
See the manual for the installation instructions, either by running
info -f doc/guix.info “Installation”
or by checking the web copy of the manual.
For information on installation from a Git checkout, please see the section “Building from Git” in the manual.
You can re-build and re-install Guix using a system that already runs Guix. To do so:
- Start a shell with the development environment for Guix:
guix environment guix
- Re-run the ‘configure’ script passing it the option ‘–localstatedir=/somewhere’, where ‘/somewhere’ is the ‘localstatedir’ value of the currently installed Guix (failing to do that would lead the new Guix to consider the store to be empty!). We recommend to use the value ‘/var’.
- Run “make”, “make check”, and “make install”.
Guix does the high-level preparation of a derivation. A derivation is
the promise of a build; it is stored as a text file under
/gnu/store/xxx.drv. The (guix derivations) module provides the
`derivation’ primitive, as well as higher-level wrappers such as
`build-expression->derivation’.
Guix does remote procedure calls (RPCs) to the build daemon (the guix-daemon
command), which in turn performs builds and accesses to the store on its
behalf. The RPCs are implemented in the (guix store) module.
GNU Guix is hosted at https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/guix/.
Please email <help-guix@gnu.org> for questions and <bug-guix@gnu.org> for bug reports; email <gnu-system-discuss@gnu.org> for general issues regarding the GNU system.
Join #guix on irc.freenode.net.
GNU Guix is based on the Nix package manager. It implements the same package deployment paradigm, and in fact it reuses some of its code. Yet, different engineering decisions were made for Guix, as described below.
Nix is really two things: a package build tool, implemented by a library and daemon, and a special-purpose programming language. GNU Guix relies on the former, but uses Scheme as a replacement for the latter.
Using Scheme instead of a specific language allows us to get all the features and tooling that come with Guile (compiler, debugger, REPL, Unicode, libraries, etc.) And it means that we have a general-purpose language, on top of which we can have embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs), such as the one used to define packages. This broadens what can be done in package recipes themselves, and what can be done around them.
Technically, Guix makes remote procedure calls to the ‘nix-worker’ daemon to perform operations on the store. At the lowest level, Nix “derivations” represent promises of a build, stored in ‘.drv’ files in the store. Guix produces such derivations, which are then interpreted by the daemon to perform the build. Thus, Guix derivations can use derivations produced by Nix (and vice versa).
With Nix and the Nixpkgs distribution, package composition happens at the Nix language level, but builders are usually written in Bash. Conversely, Guix encourages the use of Scheme for both package composition and builders. Likewise, the core functionality of Nix is written in C++ and Perl; Guix relies on some of the original C++ code, but exposes all the API as Scheme.
- Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOS, functional package manager and associated software distribution, are the inspiration of Guix
- GNU Stow builds around the idea of one directory per prefix, and a symlink tree to create user environments
- STORE shares the same idea
- GNOME’s OSTree allows bootable system images to be built from a specified set of packages
- The GNU Source Release Collection (GSRC) is a user-land software distribution; unlike Guix, it relies on core tools available on the host system