Release 20.09 (“Nightingale”, 2020.09/??)Highlights
In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the
following highlights:
Support is planned until the end of April 2021, handing over to 21.03.
GNOME desktop environment was upgraded to 3.36, see its release notes.maxx package removed along with services.xserver.desktopManager.maxx module.
Please migrate to cdesktopenv and services.xserver.desktopManager.cde module.
We now distribute a GNOME ISO.
PHP now defaults to PHP 7.4, updated from 7.3.
PHP 7.2 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 20.09 release.
Python 3 now defaults to Python 3.8 instead of 3.7.
Two new options, authorizedKeysCommand
and authorizedKeysCommandUser, have
been added to the openssh module. If you have AuthorizedKeysCommand
in your services.openssh.extraConfig you should
make use of these new options instead.
There is a new module for Podman(virtualisation.podman), a drop-in replacement for the Docker command line.
The new virtualisation.containers module manages configuration shared by the CRI-O and Podman modules.
Declarative Docker containers are renamed from docker-containers to virtualisation.oci-containers.containers.
This is to make it possible to use podman instead of docker.
MariaDB has been updated to 10.4, MariaDB Galera to 26.4.
Before you upgrade, it would be best to take a backup of your database.
For MariaDB Galera Cluster, see Upgrading
from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 with Galera Cluster instead.
Before doing the upgrade read Incompatible
Changes Between 10.3 and 10.4.
After the upgrade you will need to run mysql_upgrade.
MariaDB 10.4 introduces a number of changes to the authentication process, intended to make things easier and more
intuitive. See Authentication from MariaDB 10.4.
unix_socket auth plugin does not use a password, and uses the connecting user's UID instead. When a new MariaDB data directory is initialized, two MariaDB users are
created and can be used with new unix_socket auth plugin, as well as traditional mysql_native_password plugin: root@localhost and mysql@localhost. To actually use
the traditional mysql_native_password plugin method, one must run the following:
services.mysql.initialScript = pkgs.writeText "mariadb-init.sql" ''
ALTER USER root@localhost IDENTIFIED VIA mysql_native_password USING PASSWORD("verysecret");
'';
When MariaDB data directory is just upgraded (not initialized), the users are not created or modified.
MySQL server is now started with additional systemd sandbox/hardening options for better security. The PrivateTmp, ProtectHome, and ProtectSystem options
may be problematic when MySQL is attempting to read from or write to your filesystem anywhere outside of its own state directory, for example when
calling LOAD DATA INFILE or SELECT * INTO OUTFILE. In this scenario a variant of the following may be required:
- allow MySQL to read from /home and /tmp directories when using LOAD DATA INFILE
systemd.services.mysql.serviceConfig.ProtectHome = lib.mkForce "read-only";
- allow MySQL to write to custom folder /var/data when using SELECT * INTO OUTFILE, assuming the mysql user has write
access to /var/data
systemd.services.mysql.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths = [ "/var/data" ];
The MySQL service no longer runs its systemd service startup script as root anymore. A dedicated non root
super user account is required for operation. This means users with an existing MySQL or MariaDB database server are required to run the following SQL statements
as a super admin user before upgrading:
CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS 'mysql'@'localhost' identified with unix_socket;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'mysql'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
If you use MySQL instead of MariaDB please replace unix_socket with auth_socket. If you have changed the value of
from the default of mysql to a different user please change 'mysql'@'localhost' to the corresponding user instead.
The new option documentation.man.generateCaches
has been added to automatically generate the man-db caches, which are needed by utilities
like whatis and apropos. The caches are generated during the build of
the NixOS configuration: since this can be expensive when a large number of packages are installed, the
feature is disabled by default.
services.postfix.sslCACert was replaced by services.postfix.tlsTrustedAuthorities which now defaults to system certificate authorities.
Subordinate GID and UID mappings are now set up automatically for all normal users.
This will make container tools like Podman work as non-root users out of the box.
The various documented workarounds to use steam have been converted to a module. programs.steam.enable enables steam, controller support and the workarounds.
Support for built-in LCDs in various pieces of Logitech hardware (keyboards and USB speakers). hardware.logitech.lcd.enable enables support for all hardware supported by the g15daemon project.
Zabbix now defaults to 5.0, updated from 4.4. Please carefully read through
the upgrade guide
and apply any changes required. Be sure to take special note of the section on
enabling extended range of numeric (float) values
as you will need to apply this database migration manually.
If you are using Zabbix Server with a MySQL or MariaDB database you should note that using a character set of utf8 and a collate of utf8_bin has become mandatory with
this release. See the upstream issue for further discussion. Before upgrading you should check the character set and collation used by
your database and ensure they are correct:
SELECT
default_character_set_name,
default_collation_name
FROM
information_schema.schemata
WHERE
schema_name = 'zabbix';
If these values are not correct you should take a backup of your database and convert the character set and collation as required. Here is an
example of how to do so, taken from
the Zabbix forums:
ALTER DATABASE `zabbix` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
-- the following will produce a list of SQL commands you should subsequently execute
SELECT CONCAT("ALTER TABLE ", TABLE_NAME," CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;") AS ExecuteTheString
FROM information_schema.`COLUMNS`
WHERE table_schema = "zabbix" AND COLLATION_NAME = "utf8_general_ci";
The NixOS module system now supports freeform modules as a mix between types.attrsOf and types.submodule. These allow you to explicitly declare a subset of options while still permitting definitions without an associated option. See for how to use them.
The GRUB module gained support for basic password protection, which
allows to restrict non-default entries in the boot menu to one or more
users. The users and passwords are defined via the option
.
Note: Password support is only avaiable in GRUB version 2.
Following its deprecation in 20.03, the Perl NixOS test driver has been removed.
All remaining tests have been ported to the Python test framework.
Code outside nixpkgs using make-test.nix or
testing.nix needs to be ported to
make-test-python.nix and
testing-python.nix respectively.
New Services
The following new services were added since the last release:
There is a new module that provides doas, a lighter alternative to sudo with many of the same features.
Hercules CI Agent is a specialized build agent for projects built with Nix. See the options and setup.
Backward Incompatibilities
When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following
incompatible changes:
buildGoModule now internally creates a vendor directory
in the source tree for downloaded modules instead of using go's module
proxy protocol. This storage format is simpler and therefore less
likely to break with future versions of go. As a result
buildGoModule switched from
modSha256 to the vendorSha256
attribute to pin fetched version data.
Grafana is now built without support for phantomjs by default. Phantomjs support has been
deprecated in Grafana
and the phantomjs project is
currently unmaintained.
It can still be enabled by providing phantomJsSupport = true to the package instantiation:
{
services.grafana.package = pkgs.grafana.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: rec {
phantomJsSupport = false;
});
}
The supybot module now uses /var/lib/supybot
as its default stateDir path if stateVersion
is 20.09 or higher. It also enables a number of
systemd sandboxing options
which may possibly interfere with some plugins. If this is the case you can disable the options through attributes in
.
The security.duosec.skey option, which stored a secret in the
nix store, has been replaced by a new
security.duosec.secretKeyFile
option for better security.
security.duosec.ikey has been renamed to
security.duosec.integrationKey.
vmware has been removed from the services.x11.videoDrivers defaults.
For VMWare guests set virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable to true which will include the appropriate drivers.
The initrd SSH support now uses OpenSSH rather than Dropbear to
allow the use of Ed25519 keys and other OpenSSH-specific
functionality. Host keys must now be in the OpenSSH format, and at
least one pre-generated key must be specified.
If you used the
options, you'll get an error explaining how to convert your host
keys and migrate to the new
option.
Otherwise, if you don't have any host keys set, you'll need to
generate some; see the option
documentation for instructions.
Since this release there's an easy way to customize your PHP
install to get a much smaller base PHP with only wanted
extensions enabled. See the following snippet installing a
smaller PHP with the extensions imagick,
opcache, pdo and
pdo_mysql loaded:
environment.systemPackages = [
(pkgs.php.withExtensions
({ all, ... }: with all; [
imagick
opcache
pdo
pdo_mysql
])
)
];
The default php attribute hasn't lost any
extensions. The opcache extension has been
added.
All upstream PHP extensions are available under ]]>.
All PHP config flags have been removed for
the following reasons:
The updated php attribute is now easily
customizable to your liking by using
php.withExtensions or
php.buildEnv instead of writing config files
or changing configure flags.
The remaining configuration flags can now be set directly on
the php attribute. For example, instead of
php.override {
config.php.embed = true;
config.php.apxs2 = false;
}
you should now write
php.override {
embedSupport = true;
apxs2Support = false;
}
The ACME module has been overhauled for simplicity and maintainability.
Cert generation now implicitly uses the acme
user, and the security.acme.certs._name_.user option
has been removed. Instead, certificate access from other services is now
managed through group permissions. The module no longer runs lego
twice under certain conditions, and will correctly renew certificates if
their configuration is changed. Services which reload nginx and httpd after
certificate renewal are now properly configured too so you no longer have
to do this manually if you are using HTTPS enabled virtual hosts. A mechanism
for regenerating certs on demand has also been added and documented.
Gollum received a major update to version 5.x and you may have to change
some links in your wiki when migrating from gollum 4.x. More information
can be found
here.
Deluge 2.x was added and is used as default for new NixOS
installations where stateVersion is >= 20.09. If you are upgrading from a previous
NixOS version, you can set service.deluge.package = pkgs.deluge-2_x
to upgrade to Deluge 2.x and migrate the state to the new format.
Be aware that backwards state migrations are not supported by Deluge.
Add option services.nginx.enableSandbox to starting Nginx web server with additional sandbox/hardening options.
By default, write access to services.nginx.stateDir is allowed. To allow writing to other folders,
use systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths
systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths = [ "/var/www" ];
The NixOS options nesting.clone and
nesting.children have been deleted, and
replaced with named
configurations.
Replace a nesting.clone entry with:
{
specialisation.example-sub-configuration = {
configuration = {
...
};
};
Replace a nesting.children entry with:
{
specialisation.example-sub-configuration = {
inheritParentConfig = false;
configuration = {
...
};
};
To switch to a specialised configuration at runtime you need to
run:
# sudo /run/current-system/specialisation/example-sub-configuration/bin/switch-to-configuration test
Before you would have used:
# sudo /run/current-system/fine-tune/child-1/bin/switch-to-configuration test
The Nginx log directory has been moved to /var/log/nginx, the cache directory
to /var/cache/nginx. The option services.nginx.stateDir has
been removed.
The httpd web server previously started its main process as root
privileged, then ran worker processes as a less privileged identity user.
This was changed to start all of httpd as a less privileged user (defined by
and
). As a consequence, all files that
are needed for httpd to run (included configuration fragments, SSL
certificates and keys, etc.) must now be readable by this less privileged
user/group.
The default value for
has been changed from prefork to event. Along with
this change the default value for
services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.http2
has been set to true.
The systemd-networkd option
systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcp.CriticalConnection
has been removed following upstream systemd's deprecation of the same. It is recommended to use
systemd.network.networks.<name>.networkConfig.KeepConfiguration instead.
See systemd.network5 for details.
The systemd-networkd option
systemd.network.networks._name_.dhcpConfig
has been renamed to
following upstream systemd's documentation change.
See systemd.network5 for details.
In the picom module, several options that accepted
floating point numbers encoded as strings (for example
) have been changed
to the (relatively) new native float type. To migrate
your configuration simply remove the quotes around the numbers.
When using buildBazelPackage from Nixpkgs,
flat hash mode is now used for dependencies
instead of recursive. This is to better allow
using hashed mirrors where needed. As a result, these hashes
will have changed.
The rkt module has been removed, it was archived by upstream.
The Bazaar VCS is
unmaintained and, as consequence of the Python 2 EOL, the packages
bazaar and bazaarTools were
removed. Breezy, the backward compatible fork of Bazaar (see the
announcement),
was packaged as breezy and can be used instead.
Regarding Nixpkgs, fetchbzr,
nix-prefetch-bzr and Bazaar support in Hydra will
continue to work through Breezy.
In addition to the hostname, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN),
which consists of ${cfg.hostName} and
${cfg.domain} is now added to
/etc/hosts, to allow local FQDN resolution, as used by the
hostname --fqdn command and other applications that
try to determine the FQDN. These new entries take precedence over entries
from the DNS which could cause regressions in some very specific setups.
Additionally the hostname is now resolved to 127.0.0.2
instead of 127.0.1.1 to be consistent with what
nss-myhostname (from systemd) returns.
The old behaviour can e.g. be restored by using
networking.hosts = lib.mkForce { "127.0.1.1" = [ config.networking.hostName ]; };.
The hostname (networking.hostName) must now be a valid
DNS label (see RFC 1035) and as such must not contain the domain part.
This means that the hostname must start with a letter, end with a letter
or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and
hyphen. The maximum length is 63 characters. Additionally it is
recommended to only use lower-case characters.
The GRUB specific option
has been replaced with the generic option
. This option creates a secondary
initrd from the specified files, rather than using a manually created
initrd file.
Due to an existing bug with ,
it is not possible to directly boot an older generation that used that
option. It is still possible to rollback to that generation if the required
initrd file has not been deleted.
The DNSChain
package and NixOS module have been removed from Nixpkgs as the software is
unmaintained and can't be built. For more information see issue
#89205.
In the resilio module, has been changed to listen to [::1] instead of 0.0.0.0.
Users of OpenAFS 1.6 must
upgrade their services to OpenAFS 1.8! In this release, the OpenAFS package
version 1.6.24 is marked broken but can be used during transition to
OpenAFS 1.8.x. Use the options
,
and
to select a different
OpenAFS package. OpenAFS 1.6 will be removed in the next release. The
package openafs and the service options will then
silently point to the OpenAFS 1.8 release.
See also the OpenAFS Administrator
Guide for instructions. Beware of the following when updating
servers:
The storage format of the server key has changed and the key must be converted before running the new release.
When updating multiple database servers, turn off the database servers
from the highest IP down to the lowest with resting periods in
between. Start up in reverse order. Do not concurrently run database
servers working with different OpenAFS releases!
Update servers first, then clients.
Radicale's default package has changed from 2.x to 3.x. An upgrade
checklist can be found
here.
You can use the newer version in the NixOS service by setting the
package to radicale3, which is done
automatically if stateVersion is 20.09 or higher.
udpt experienced a complete rewrite from C++ to rust. The configuration format changed from ini to toml.
The new configuration documentation can be found at
the official website and example
configuration is packaged in ${udpt}/share/udpt/udpt.toml.
We now have a unified option interface
to be used for every display-manager in NixOS.
The bitcoind module has changed to multi-instance, using submodules.
Therefore, it is now mandatory to name each instance.
To use this new multi-instance config with an existing bitcoind data directory and user,
you have to adjust the original config, e.g.:
services.bitcoind = {
enable = true;
extraConfig = "...";
...
};
To something similar:
services.bitcoind.mainnet = {
enable = true;
dataDir = "/var/lib/bitcoind";
user = "bitcoin";
extraConfig = "...";
...
};
The key settings are:
dataDir - to continue using the same data directory.
user - to continue using the same user so that bitcoind maintains access to its files.
Graylog introduced a change in the LDAP server certificate validation behaviour for version 3.3.3 which might break existing setups.
When updating Graylog from a version before 3.3.3 make sure to check the Graylog release info for information on how to avoid the issue.
The dokuwiki module has changed to multi-instance, using submodules.
Therefore, it is now mandatory to name each instance. Moreover, forcing SSL by default has been dropped, so
nginx.forceSSL and nginx.enableACME are no longer set to true.
To continue using your service with the original SSL settings, you have to adjust the original config, e.g.:
services.dokuwiki = {
enable = true;
...
};
To something similar:
services.dokuwiki."mywiki" = {
enable = true;
nginx = {
forceSSL = true;
enableACME = true;
};
...
};
The base package has also been upgraded to the 2020-07-29 "Hogfather" release. Plugins might be incompatible or require upgrading.
The option is now set to "/var/lib/postgresql/${cfg.package.psqlSchema}" regardless of your
. Users with an existing postgresql install that have a of 17.03 or below
should double check what the value of their option is (/var/db/postgresql) and then explicitly
set this value to maintain compatibility:
services.postgresql.dataDir = "/var/db/postgresql";
The postgresql module now expects there to be a database super user account called postgres regardless of your . Users
with an existing postgresql install that have a of 17.03 or below should run the following SQL statements as a
database super admin user before upgrading:
CREATE ROLE postgres LOGIN SUPERUSER;
The USBGuard module now removes options and instead hardcodes values for IPCAccessControlFiles, ruleFiles, and auditFilePath. Audit logs can be found in the journal.
The NixOS module system now evaluates option definitions more strictly, allowing it to detect a larger set of problems.
As a result, what previously evaluated may not do so anymore.
See the PR that changed this for more info.
For NixOS configuration options, the type loaOf, after
its initial deprecation in release 20.03, has been removed. In NixOS and
Nixpkgs options using this type have been converted to attrsOf.
For more information on this change have look at these links:
issue #1800,
PR #63103.
config.systemd.services.${name}.path now returns a list of paths instead of a colon-separated string.
Caddy module now uses Caddy v2 by default. Caddy v1 can still be used by setting
to pkgs.caddy1.
New option has been added.
Other Notable ChangesSD images are now compressed by default using zstd. The compression for ISO images has also been changed to zstd, but ISO images are still not compressed by default.
was updated from
1000 to 10000 to follow the new
upstream systemd default.
The notmuch package move its emacs-related binaries and
emacs lisp files to a separate output. They're not part
of the default out output anymore - if you relied on the
notmuch-emacs-mua binary or the emacs lisp files, access them via
the notmuch.emacs output.
The default output of buildGoPackage is now $out instead of $bin.
buildGoModuledoCheck now defaults to true.
Packages built using buildRustPackage now use release
mode for the checkPhase by default.
Please note that Rust packages utilizing a custom build/install procedure
(e.g. by using a Makefile) or test suites that rely on the
structure of the target/ directory may break due to those assumptions.
For further information, please read the Rust section in the Nixpkgs manual.
The cc- and binutils-wrapper's "infix salt" and _BUILD_ and _TARGET_ user infixes have been replaced with with a "suffix salt" and suffixes and _FOR_BUILD and _FOR_TARGET.
This matches the autotools convention for env vars which standard for these things, making interfacing with other tools easier.
Additional Git documentation (HTML and text files) is now available via the git-doc package.
Default algorithm for ZRAM swap was changed to zstd.
The scripted networking system now uses .link files in
/etc/systemd/network to configure mac address and link MTU,
instead of the sometimes buggy network-link-* units, which
have been removed.
Bringing the interface up has been moved to the beginning of the
network-addresses-* unit.
Note this doesn't require systemd-networkd - it's udev that
parses .link files.
Extra care needs to be taken in the presence of legacy udev rules
to rename interfaces, as MAC Address and MTU defined in these options can only match on the original link name.
In such cases, you most likely want to create a 10-*.link file through and set both name and MAC Address / MTU there.
Grafana received a major update to version 7.x. A plugin is now needed for
image rendering support, and plugins must now be signed by default. More
information can be found
in the Grafana documentation.
The hardware.u2f module, which was installing udev rules
was removed, as udev gained native support to handle FIDO security tokens.
The services.transmission module
was enhanced with the new options:
,
,
and .
transmission-daemon is now started with additional systemd sandbox/hardening options for better security.
Please report
any use case where this is not working well.
In particular, the RootDirectory option newly set
forbids uploading or downloading a torrent outside of the default directory
configured at settings.download-dir.
If you really need Transmission to access other directories,
you must include those directories into the BindPaths of the service:
systemd.services.transmission.serviceConfig.BindPaths = [ "/path/to/alternative/download-dir" ];
Also, connection to the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) of transmission-daemon
is now only available on the local network interface by default.
Use:
services.transmission.settings.rpc-bind-address = "0.0.0.0";
to get the previous behavior of listening on all network interfaces.
With this release systemd-networkd (when enabled through )
has it's netlink socket created through a systemd.socket unit. This gives us control over
socket buffer sizes and other parameters. For larger setups where networkd has to create a lot of (virtual)
devices the default buffer size (currently 128MB) is not enough.
On a machine with >100 virtual interfaces (e.g., wireguard tunnels, VLANs, …), that all have to
be brought up during system startup, the receive buffer size will spike for a brief period.
Eventually some of the message will be dropped since there is not enough (permitted) buffer
space available.
By having systemd-networkd start with a netlink socket created by
systemd we can configure the ReceiveBufferSize= parameter
in the socket options (i.e. systemd.sockets.systemd-networkd.socketOptions.ReceiveBufferSize)
without recompiling systemd-networkd.
Since the actual memory requirements depend on hardware, timing, exact
configurations etc. it isn't currently possible to infer a good default
from within the NixOS module system. Administrators are advised to
monitor the logs of systemd-networkd for rtnl: kernel receive buffer
overrun spam and increase the memory limit as they see fit.
Note: Increasing the ReceiveBufferSize= doesn't allocate any memory. It just increases
the upper bound on the kernel side. The memory allocation depends on the amount of messages that are
queued on the kernel side of the netlink socket.
Specifying mailboxes in the dovecot2 module
as a list is deprecated and will break eval in 21.03. Instead, an attribute-set should be specified where the name
should be the key of the attribute.
This means that a configuration like this
{
services.dovecot2.mailboxes = [
{ name = "Junk";
auto = "create";
}
];
}
should now look like this:
{
services.dovecot2.mailboxes = {
Junk.auto = "create";
};
}netbeans was upgraded to 12.0 and now defaults to OpenJDK 11. This might cause problems if your projects depend on packages that were removed in Java 11.
nextcloud has been updated to v19.
If you have an existing installation, please make sure that you're on
nextcloud18 before upgrading to nextcloud19
since Nextcloud doesn't support upgrades across multiple major versions.
The nixos-run-vms script now deletes the
previous run machines states on test startup. You can use the
--keep-vm-state flag to match the previous
behaviour and keep the same VM state between different test runs.
The nix.buildMachines option is now type-checked.
There are no functional changes, however this may require updating some configurations to use correct types for all attributes.
The fontconfig module stopped generating fontconfig 2.10.x config and cache.
Fontconfig 2.10.x was removed from Nixpkgs - it hasn't been used in any nixpkgs package anymore.
Nginx module nginxModules.fastcgi-cache-purge renamed to official name nginxModules.cache-purge.
Nginx module nginxModules.ngx_aws_auth renamed to official name nginxModules.aws-auth.
The option was added. It installs the packages perl, rsync and strace for now. They were added unconditionally to before, but are not strictly necessary for a minimal NixOS install. You can set it to an empty list to have a more minimal system. Be aware that some functionality might still have an impure dependency on those packages, so things might break.
The undervolt option no longer needs to apply its
settings every 30s. If they still become undone, open an issue and restore
the previous behaviour using undervolt.useTimer.
Agda has been heavily reworked.
agda.mkDerivation has been heavily changed and
is now located at agdaPackages.mkDerivation.
New top-level packages agda and
agda.withPackages have been added, the second
of which sets up agda with access to chosen libraries.
All agda libraries now live under
agdaPackages.
Many broken libraries have been removed.
See the new
documentation for more information.
The deepin package set has been removed from
nixpkgs. It was a work in progress to package the
Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE),
including libraries, tools and applications, and it was still
missing a service to lauch the desktop environment. It has shown
to no longer be a feasible goal due to reasons discussed in
issue #94870.
The package netease-cloud-music has also been
removed, as it depends on libraries from deepin.
The opendkim module now uses systemd sandboxing features
to limit the exposure of the system towards the opendkim service.