3
0
Fork 0
forked from mirrors/nixpkgs
nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/from_md/development/sources.chapter.xml

91 lines
3.5 KiB
XML
Raw Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters

This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:id="sec-getting-sources">
<title>Getting the Sources</title>
<para>
By default, NixOSs <literal>nixos-rebuild</literal> command uses
the NixOS and Nixpkgs sources provided by the
<literal>nixos</literal> channel (kept in
<literal>/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos</literal>).
To modify NixOS, however, you should check out the latest sources
from Git. This is as follows:
</para>
<programlisting>
$ git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
$ cd nixpkgs
$ git remote update origin
</programlisting>
<para>
This will check out the latest Nixpkgs sources to
<literal>./nixpkgs</literal> the NixOS sources to
<literal>./nixpkgs/nixos</literal>. (The NixOS source tree lives in
a subdirectory of the Nixpkgs repository.) The
<literal>nixpkgs</literal> repository has branches that correspond
to each Nixpkgs/NixOS channel (see <xref linkend="sec-upgrading" />
for more information about channels). Thus, the Git branch
<literal>origin/nixos-17.03</literal> will contain the latest built
and tested version available in the <literal>nixos-17.03</literal>
channel.
</para>
<para>
Its often inconvenient to develop directly on the master branch,
since if somebody has just committed (say) a change to GCC, then the
binary cache may not have caught up yet and youll have to rebuild
everything from source. So you may want to create a local branch
based on your current NixOS version:
</para>
<programlisting>
$ nixos-version
17.09pre104379.6e0b727 (Hummingbird)
$ git checkout -b local 6e0b727
</programlisting>
<para>
Or, to base your local branch on the latest version available in a
NixOS channel:
</para>
<programlisting>
$ git remote update origin
$ git checkout -b local origin/nixos-17.03
</programlisting>
<para>
(Replace <literal>nixos-17.03</literal> with the name of the channel
you want to use.) You can use <literal>git merge</literal> or
<literal>git rebase</literal> to keep your local branch in sync with
the channel, e.g.
</para>
<programlisting>
$ git remote update origin
$ git merge origin/nixos-17.03
</programlisting>
<para>
You can use <literal>git cherry-pick</literal> to copy commits from
your local branch to the upstream branch.
</para>
<para>
If you want to rebuild your system using your (modified) sources,
you need to tell <literal>nixos-rebuild</literal> about them using
the <literal>-I</literal> flag:
</para>
<programlisting>
# nixos-rebuild switch -I nixpkgs=/my/sources/nixpkgs
</programlisting>
<para>
If you want <literal>nix-env</literal> to use the expressions in
<literal>/my/sources</literal>, use
<literal>nix-env -f /my/sources/nixpkgs</literal>, or change the
default by adding a symlink in <literal>~/.nix-defexpr</literal>:
</para>
<programlisting>
$ ln -s /my/sources/nixpkgs ~/.nix-defexpr/nixpkgs
</programlisting>
<para>
You may want to delete the symlink
<literal>~/.nix-defexpr/channels_root</literal> to prevent roots
NixOS channel from clashing with your own tree (this may break the
command-not-found utility though). If you want to go back to the
default state, you may just remove the
<literal>~/.nix-defexpr</literal> directory completely, log out and
log in again and it should have been recreated with a link to the
root channels.
</para>
</chapter>