path: root/doc/manual/installation.xml

<chapter id='chap-installation'>
  <title>Installation</title>

  <sect1>
    <title>Obtaining Nix</title>

    <para>
      The easiest way to obtain Nix is to download a <ulink
      url='http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/ST/Trace/Nix'>source
      distribution</ulink>.  RPMs for SuSE and Red Hat are also
      available.  These distributions are generated automatically.
    </para>

    <para>
      Alternatively, the most recent sources of Nix can be obtained from its
      <ulink url='https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/nix/trunk'>Subversion 
        repository</ulink>.  For example, the following command will check out
      the latest revision into a directory called <filename>nix</filename>:
    </para>

    <screen>
$ svn checkout https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/nix/trunk nix</screen>

    <para>
      Likewise, specific releases can be obtained from the <ulink
        url='https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/nix/tags'>tags
        directory</ulink> of the repository.  If you don't have Subversion, you
      can also download an automatically generated <ulink
        url='https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/dist/trace/'>compressed
        tar-file</ulink> of the head revision of the trunk.
    </para>

  </sect1>

  <sect1>
    <title>Prerequisites</title>

    <para>
      The following prerequisites only apply when you build from
      source.  Binary releases (e.g., RPMs) have no prerequisites.
    </para>

    <para>
      A fairly recent version of GCC/G++ is required.  Version 2.95
      and higher should work.
    </para>

    <para>
      To build this manual and the man-pages you need the
      <command>xmllint</command> and <command>xsltproc</command>
      programs, which are part of the <literal>libxml2</literal> and
      <literal>libxslt</literal> packages, respectively.  You also
      need the <ulink
      url='http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/'>DocBook XSL
      stylesheets</ulink> and optionally the <ulink
      url='http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbook-xml-4.2.zip'>
      DocBook XML 4.2 DTD</ulink>.  Note that these are only required
      if you modify the manual sources or when you are building from
      the Subversion repository.
    </para>

    <para>
      To build the parser, very <emphasis>recent</emphasis> versions
      of Bison and Flex are required.  (This is because Nix needs GLR
      support in Bison and reentrancy support in Flex.)  For Bison,
      you need version 1.875c or higher (1.875 does
      <emphasis>not</emphasis> work), which can be obtained from the
      <ulink url='ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/bison'>GNU FTP
      server</ulink>.  For Flex, you need version 2.5.31, which is
      available on <ulink
      url='http://lex.sourceforge.net/'>SourceForge</ulink>.  Slightly
      older versions may also work, but ancient versions like the
      ubiquitous 2.5.4a won't.  Note that these are only required if
      you modify the parser or when you are building from the
      Subversion repository.
    </para>

    <para>
      Nix uses Sleepycat's Berkeley DB and CWI's ATerm library.  These
      are included in the Nix source distribution.  If you build from
      the Subversion repository, you must download them yourself and
      place them in the <filename>externals/</filename> directory.
      See <filename>externals/Makefile.am</filename> for the precise
      URLs of these packages.
    </para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1>
    <title>Building Nix from source</title>

    <para>
      After unpacking or checking out the Nix sources, issue the following
      commands:
    </para>

    <screen>
$ ./configure <replaceable>options...</replaceable>
$ make
$ make install</screen>

    <para>
      When building from the Subversion repository, these should be preceded by
      the command:
    </para>

    <screen>
$ autoreconf -i</screen>

    <para>
      The installation path can be specified by passing the
      <option>--prefix=<replaceable>prefix</replaceable></option> to
      <command>configure</command>.  The default installation directory is
      <filename>/nix</filename>.  You can change this to any location you like.
      You must have write permission to the <replaceable>prefix</replaceable>
      path.
    </para>

    <warning>
      <para>
        It is advisable <emphasis>not</emphasis> to change the installation
        prefix from its default, since doing so will in all likelihood make it
        impossible to use derivations built on other systems.
      </para>
    </warning>

    <para>
      If you want to rebuilt the documentation, pass the full path to the
      DocBook XML catalog file (<filename>docbook.cat</filename>) and to the
      DocBook XSL stylesheets using the
      <option>--with-docbook-catalog=<replaceable>path</replaceable></option>
      and <option>--with-docbook-xsl=<replaceable>path</replaceable></option>
      options.
    </para>

  </sect1>


  <sect1>
    <title>Installing from RPMs</title>

    <para>
      RPM packages of Nix can be downloaded from <ulink
      url='http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/ST/Trace/Nix' />.  These RPMs
      should work for most fairly recent releases of SuSE and Red Hat
      Linux.  They have been known to work work on SuSE Linux 8.1 and
      9.0, and Red Hat 9.0.  In fact, it should work on any RPM-based
      Linux distribution based on <literal>glibc</literal> 2.3 or
      later.
    </para>

    <para>
      Once downloaded, the RPMs can be installed or upgraded using
      <command>rpm -U</command>.  For example,
    </para>

    <screen>
rpm -U nix-0.5pre664-1.i386.rpm</screen>

    <para>
      The RPMs install into the directory <filename>/nix</filename>.
      Nix can be uninstalled using <command>rpm -e nix</command>.
      After this it will be necessary to manually remove the Nix store
      and other auxiliary data:
    </para>

    <screen>
rm -rf /nix/store
rm -rf /nix/var</screen>

  </sect1>

  <sect1>
    <title>Permissions</title>

    <para>
      All Nix operations must be performed under the user ID that owns
      the Nix store and database
      (<filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/store</filename>
      and
      <filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/var/nix/db</filename>,
      respectively).  When installed from the RPM packages, these
      directories are owned by <systemitem
      class='username'>root</systemitem>.
    </para>

  </sect1>

  <sect1>
    <title>Using Nix</title>

    <para>
      To use Nix, some environment variables should be set.  In
      particular, <envar>PATH</envar> should contain the directories
      <filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/bin</filename> and
      <filename>~/.nix-profile/bin</filename>.  The first directory
      contains the Nix tools themselves, while
      <filename>~/.nix-profile</filename> is a symbolic link to the
      current <emphasis>user environment</emphasis> (an automatically
      generated package consisting of symlinks to installed packages).
      The simplest way to set the required environment variables is to
      include the file
      <filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/etc/profile.d/nix.sh</filename>
      in your <filename>~/.bashrc</filename> (or similar), like this:
    </para>

    <screen>
. <replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/etc/profile.d/nix.sh</screen>

  </sect1>

</chapter>