Installing a Binary Distribution

Updating to macOS 15 Sequoia

If you recently updated to macOS 15 Sequoia and are getting
error: the user '_nixbld1' in the group 'nixbld' does not exist
when running Nix commands, refer to GitHub issue NixOS/nix#10892 for instructions to fix your installation without reinstalling.

To install the latest version Nix, run the following command:

$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

This performs the default type of installation for your platform:

Multi-user:
- Linux with systemd and without SELinux
- macOS

The installer can configured with various command line arguments and environment variables. To show available command line flags:

$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh -s -- --help

To check what it does and how it can be customised further, download and edit the second-stage installation script.

Installing a pinned Nix version from a URL

Version-specific installation URLs for all Nix versions since 1.11.16 can be found at releases.nixos.org. The directory for each version contains the corresponding SHA-256 hash.

All installation scripts are invoked the same way:

$ export VERSION=2.19.2
$ curl -L https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/install | sh

Multi User Installation

The multi-user Nix installation creates system users and a system service for the Nix daemon.

Supported systems:

Linux running systemd, with SELinux disabled
macOS

To explicitly instruct the installer to perform a multi-user installation on your system:

$ bash <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

You can run this under your usual user account or root. The script will invoke sudo as needed.

Installing from a binary tarball

You can also download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies:

Choose a version and system type
Download and unpack the tarball
Run the installer

Example

$ pushd $(mktemp -d)
$ export VERSION=2.19.2
$ export SYSTEM=x86_64-linux
$ curl -LO https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz
$ tar xfj nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz
$ cd nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM
$ ./install
$ popd

The installer can be customised with the environment variables declared in the file named install-multi-user.

Native packages for Linux distributions

The Nix community maintains installers for some Linux distributions in their native packaging format(https://nix-community.github.io/nix-installers/).

macOS Installation

[]{#sect-macos-installation-change-store-prefix}[]{#sect-macos-installation-encrypted-volume}[]{#sect-macos-installation-symlink}[]{#sect-macos-installation-recommended-notes}

We believe we have ironed out how to cleanly support the read-only root file system on modern macOS. New installs will do this automatically.

This section previously detailed the situation, options, and trade-offs, but it now only outlines what the installer does. You don't need to know this to run the installer, but it may help if you run into trouble:

create a new APFS volume for your Nix store
update /etc/synthetic.conf to direct macOS to create a "synthetic" empty root directory to mount your volume
specify mount options for the volume in /etc/fstab
- rw: read-write
- noauto: prevent the system from auto-mounting the volume (so the LaunchDaemon mentioned below can control mounting it, and to avoid masking problems with that mounting service).
- nobrowse: prevent the Nix Store volume from showing up on your desktop; also keeps Spotlight from spending resources to index this volume
- if you have FileVault enabled
  - generate an encryption password
  - put it in your system Keychain
  - use it to encrypt the volume
create a system LaunchDaemon to mount this volume early enough in the boot process to avoid problems loading or restoring any programs that need access to your Nix store

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