nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/installation/installing.chapter.md

Installing NixOS

Booting from the install medium

To begin the installation, you have to boot your computer from the install drive.

1. Plug in the install drive. Then turn on or restart your computer.

2. Open the boot menu by pressing the appropriate key, which is usually shown on the display on early boot. Select the USB flash drive (the option usually contains the word "USB"). If you choose the incorrect drive, your computer will likely continue to boot as normal. In that case restart your computer and pick a different drive.

   ::: {.note} The key to open the boot menu is different across computer brands and even models. It can be F12, but also F1, F9, F10, Enter, Del, Esc or another function key. If you are unsure and don't see it on the early boot screen, you can search online for your computers brand, model followed by "boot from usb". The computer might not even have that feature, so you have to go into the BIOS/UEFI settings to change the boot order. Again, search online for details about your specific computer model.

   For Apple computers with Intel processors press and hold the ⌥ (Option or Alt) key until you see the boot menu. On Apple silicon press and hold the power button. :::

   ::: {.note} If your computer supports both BIOS and UEFI boot, choose the UEFI option. :::

   ::: {.note} If you use a CD for the installation, the computer will probably boot from it automatically. If not, choose the option containing the word "CD" from the boot menu. :::

3. Shortly after selecting the appropriate boot drive, you should be presented with a menu with different installer options. Leave the default and wait (or press Enter to speed up).

4. The graphical images will start their corresponding desktop environment and the graphical installer, which can take some time. The minimal images will boot to a command line. You have to follow the instructions in there.

Graphical Installation

The graphical installer is recommended for desktop users and will guide you through the installation.

1. In the "Welcome" screen, you can select the language of the Installer and the installed system.

   ::: {.tip} Leaving the language as "American English" will make it easier to search for error messages in a search engine or to report an issue. :::

2. Next you should choose your location to have the timezone set correctly. You can actually click on the map!

   ::: {.note} The installer will use an online service to guess your location based on your public IP address. :::

3. Then you can select the keyboard layout. The default keyboard model should work well with most desktop keyboards. If you have a special keyboard or notebook, your model might be in the list. Select the language you are most comfortable typing in.

4. On the "Users" screen, you have to type in your display name, login name and password. You can also enable an option to automatically login to the desktop.

5. Then you have the option to choose a desktop environment. If you want to create a custom setup with a window manager, you can select "No desktop".

   ::: {.tip} If you don't have a favorite desktop and don't know which one to choose, you can stick to either GNOME or Plasma. They have a quite different design, so you should choose whichever you like better. They are both popular choices and well tested on NixOS. :::

6. You have the option to allow unfree software in the next screen.

7. The easiest option in the "Partitioning" screen is "Erase disk", which will delete all data from the selected disk and install the system on it. Also select "Swap (with Hibernation)" in the dropdown below it. You have the option to encrypt the whole disk with LUKS.

   ::: {.note} At the top left you see if the Installer was booted with BIOS or UEFI. If you know your system supports UEFI and it shows "BIOS", reboot with the correct option. :::

   ::: {.warning} Make sure you have selected the correct disk at the top and that no valuable data is still on the disk! It will be deleted when formatting the disk. :::

8. Check the choices you made in the "Summary" and click "Install".

   ::: {.note} The installation takes about 15 minutes. The time varies based on the selected desktop environment, internet connection speed and disk write speed. :::

9. When the install is complete, remove the USB flash drive and reboot into your new system!

Manual Installation

NixOS can be installed on BIOS or UEFI systems. The procedure for a UEFI installation is broadly the same as for a BIOS installation. The differences are mentioned in the following steps.

The NixOS manual is available by running nixos-help in the command line or from the application menu in the desktop environment.

To have access to the command line on the graphical images, open Terminal (GNOME) or Konsole (Plasma) from the application menu.

You are logged-in automatically as nixos. The nixos user account has an empty password so you can use sudo without a password:

$ sudo -i

You can use loadkeys to switch to your preferred keyboard layout. (We even provide neo2 via loadkeys de neo!)

If the text is too small to be legible, try setfont ter-v32n to increase the font size.

To install over a serial port connect with 115200n8 (e.g. picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0). When the bootloader lists boot entries, select the serial console boot entry.

Networking in the installer

[]{#sec-installation-booting-networking}

The boot process should have brought up networking (check ip a). Networking is necessary for the installer, since it will download lots of stuff (such as source tarballs or Nixpkgs channel binaries). It's best if you have a DHCP server on your network. Otherwise configure networking manually using ifconfig.

On the graphical installer, you can configure the network, wifi included, through NetworkManager. Using the nmtui program, you can do so even in a non-graphical session. If you prefer to configure the network manually, disable NetworkManager with systemctl stop NetworkManager.

On the minimal installer, NetworkManager is not available, so configuration must be perfomed manually. To configure the wifi, first start wpa_supplicant with sudo systemctl start wpa_supplicant, then run wpa_cli. For most home networks, you need to type in the following commands:

> add_network
0
> set_network 0 ssid "myhomenetwork"
OK
> set_network 0 psk "mypassword"
OK
> set_network 0 key_mgmt WPA-PSK
OK
> enable_network 0
OK

For enterprise networks, for example eduroam, instead do:

> add_network
0
> set_network 0 ssid "eduroam"
OK
> set_network 0 identity "myname@example.com"
OK
> set_network 0 password "mypassword"
OK
> set_network 0 key_mgmt WPA-EAP
OK
> enable_network 0
OK

When successfully connected, you should see a line such as this one

<3>CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 32:85:ab:ef:24:5c completed [id=0 id_str=]

you can now leave wpa_cli by typing quit.

If you would like to continue the installation from a different machine you can use activated SSH daemon. You need to copy your ssh key to either /home/nixos/.ssh/authorized_keys or /root/.ssh/authorized_keys (Tip: For installers with a modifiable filesystem such as the sd-card installer image a key can be manually placed by mounting the image on a different machine). Alternatively you must set a password for either root or nixos with passwd to be able to login.

Partitioning and formatting

[]{#sec-installation-partitioning}

The NixOS installer doesn't do any partitioning or formatting, so you need to do that yourself.

The NixOS installer ships with multiple partitioning tools. The examples below use parted, but also provides fdisk, gdisk, cfdisk, and cgdisk.

The recommended partition scheme differs depending if the computer uses Legacy Boot or UEFI.

UEFI (GPT)

[]{#sec-installation-partitioning-UEFI}

Here's an example partition scheme for UEFI, using /dev/sda as the device.

::: {.note} You can safely ignore parted's informational message about needing to update /etc/fstab. :::

1. Create a GPT partition table.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mklabel gpt
   

2. Add the root partition. This will fill the disk except for the end part, where the swap will live, and the space left in front (512MiB) which will be used by the boot partition.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary 512MB -8GB
   

3. Next, add a swap partition. The size required will vary according to needs, here a 8GB one is created.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary linux-swap -8GB 100%
   

   ::: {.note} The swap partition size rules are no different than for other Linux distributions. :::

4. Finally, the boot partition. NixOS by default uses the ESP (EFI system partition) as its /boot partition. It uses the initially reserved 512MiB at the start of the disk.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart ESP fat32 1MB 512MB
   # parted /dev/sda -- set 3 esp on
   

Once complete, you can follow with .

Legacy Boot (MBR)

[]{#sec-installation-partitioning-MBR}

Here's an example partition scheme for Legacy Boot, using /dev/sda as the device.

::: {.note} You can safely ignore parted's informational message about needing to update /etc/fstab. :::

1. Create a MBR partition table.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mklabel msdos
   

2. Add the root partition. This will fill the the disk except for the end part, where the swap will live.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary 1MB -8GB
   

3. Set the root partition's boot flag to on. This allows the disk to be booted from.

   # parted /dev/sda -- set 1 boot on
   

4. Finally, add a swap partition. The size required will vary according to needs, here a 8GiB one is created.

   # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary linux-swap -8GB 100%
   

   ::: {.note} The swap partition size rules are no different than for other Linux distributions. :::

Once complete, you can follow with .

Formatting

[]{#sec-installation-partitioning-formatting}

Use the following commands:

• For initialising Ext4 partitions: mkfs.ext4. It is recommended that you assign a unique symbolic label to the file system using the option -L label, since this makes the file system configuration independent from device changes. For example:

  # mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/sda1
  

• For creating swap partitions: mkswap. Again it's recommended to assign a label to the swap partition: -L label. For example:

  # mkswap -L swap /dev/sda2
  

• UEFI systems

  For creating boot partitions: mkfs.fat. Again it's recommended to assign a label to the boot partition: -n label. For example:

  # mkfs.fat -F 32 -n boot /dev/sda3
  

• For creating LVM volumes, the LVM commands, e.g., pvcreate, vgcreate, and lvcreate.

• For creating software RAID devices, use mdadm.

Installing

[]{#sec-installation-installing}

1. Mount the target file system on which NixOS should be installed on /mnt, e.g.

   # mount /dev/disk/by-label/nixos /mnt
   

2. UEFI systems

   Mount the boot file system on /mnt/boot, e.g.

   # mkdir -p /mnt/boot
   # mount /dev/disk/by-label/boot /mnt/boot
   

3. If your machine has a limited amount of memory, you may want to activate swap devices now (swapon device). The installer (or rather, the build actions that it may spawn) may need quite a bit of RAM, depending on your configuration.

   # swapon /dev/sda2
   

4. You now need to create a file /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix that specifies the intended configuration of the system. This is because NixOS has a declarative configuration model: you create or edit a description of the desired configuration of your system, and then NixOS takes care of making it happen. The syntax of the NixOS configuration file is described in , while a list of available configuration options appears in . A minimal example is shown in Example: NixOS Configuration.

   The command nixos-generate-config can generate an initial configuration file for you:

   # nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
   

   You should then edit /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix to suit your needs:

   # nano /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
   

   If you're using the graphical ISO image, other editors may be available (such as vim). If you have network access, you can also install other editors -- for instance, you can install Emacs by running nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA emacs.

   BIOS systems

   You must set the option to specify on which disk the GRUB boot loader is to be installed. Without it, NixOS cannot boot.

   If there are other operating systems running on the machine before installing NixOS, the option can be set to true to automatically add them to the grub menu.

   UEFI systems

   You must select a boot-loader, either system-boot or GRUB. The recommended option is systemd-boot: set the option to true. nixos-generate-config should do this automatically for new configurations when booted in UEFI mode.

   You may want to look at the options starting with boot.loader.efi and boot.loader.systemd-boot as well.

   If you want to use GRUB, set to nodev and to true.

   With system-boot, you should not need any special configuration to detect other installed systems. With GRUB, set to true, but this will only detect windows partitions, not other linux distributions. If you dual boot another linux distribution, use system-boot instead.

   If you need to configure networking for your machine the configuration options are described in . In particular, while wifi is supported on the installation image, it is not enabled by default in the configuration generated by nixos-generate-config.

   Another critical option is fileSystems, specifying the file systems that need to be mounted by NixOS. However, you typically don't need to set it yourself, because nixos-generate-config sets it automatically in /mnt/etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix from your currently mounted file systems. (The configuration file hardware-configuration.nix is included from configuration.nix and will be overwritten by future invocations of nixos-generate-config; thus, you generally should not modify it.) Additionally, you may want to look at Hardware configuration for known-hardware at this point or after installation.

   ::: {.note} Depending on your hardware configuration or type of file system, you may need to set the option boot.initrd.kernelModules to include the kernel modules that are necessary for mounting the root file system, otherwise the installed system will not be able to boot. (If this happens, boot from the installation media again, mount the target file system on /mnt, fix /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix and rerun nixos-install.) In most cases, nixos-generate-config will figure out the required modules. :::

5. Do the installation:

   # nixos-install
   

   This will install your system based on the configuration you provided. If anything fails due to a configuration problem or any other issue (such as a network outage while downloading binaries from the NixOS binary cache), you can re-run nixos-install after fixing your configuration.nix.

   As the last step, nixos-install will ask you to set the password for the root user, e.g.

   setting root password...
   New password: ***
   Retype new password: ***
   

   ::: {.note} For unattended installations, it is possible to use nixos-install --no-root-passwd in order to disable the password prompt entirely. :::

6. If everything went well:

   # reboot
   

7. You should now be able to boot into the installed NixOS. The GRUB boot menu shows a list of available configurations (initially just one). Every time you change the NixOS configuration (see Changing Configuration), a new item is added to the menu. This allows you to easily roll back to a previous configuration if something goes wrong.

   You should log in and change the root password with passwd.

   You'll probably want to create some user accounts as well, which can be done with useradd:

   $ useradd -c 'Eelco Dolstra' -m eelco
   $ passwd eelco
   

   You may also want to install some software. This will be covered in .

Installation summary

[]{#sec-installation-summary}

To summarise, Example: Commands for Installing NixOS on /dev/sda shows a typical sequence of commands for installing NixOS on an empty hard drive (here /dev/sda). Example: NixOS Configuration shows a corresponding configuration Nix expression.

::: {#ex-partition-scheme-MBR .example} ::: {.title} Example: Example partition schemes for NixOS on /dev/sda (MBR) :::

# parted /dev/sda -- mklabel msdos
# parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary 1MiB -8GiB
# parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary linux-swap -8GiB 100%

:::

::: {#ex-partition-scheme-UEFI .example} ::: {.title} Example: Example partition schemes for NixOS on /dev/sda (UEFI) :::

# parted /dev/sda -- mklabel gpt
# parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary 512MiB -8GiB
# parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary linux-swap -8GiB 100%
# parted /dev/sda -- mkpart ESP fat32 1MiB 512MiB
# parted /dev/sda -- set 3 esp on

:::

::: {#ex-install-sequence .example} ::: {.title} Example: Commands for Installing NixOS on /dev/sda ::: With a partitioned disk.

# mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/sda1
# mkswap -L swap /dev/sda2
# swapon /dev/sda2
# mkfs.fat -F 32 -n boot /dev/sda3        # (for UEFI systems only)
# mount /dev/disk/by-label/nixos /mnt
# mkdir -p /mnt/boot                      # (for UEFI systems only)
# mount /dev/disk/by-label/boot /mnt/boot # (for UEFI systems only)
# nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
# nano /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
# nixos-install
# reboot

:::

::: {#ex-config .example} ::: {.title} Example: NixOS Configuration :::

{ config, pkgs, ... }: {
  imports = [
    # Include the results of the hardware scan.
    ./hardware-configuration.nix
  ];

  boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda";   # (for BIOS systems only)
  boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true; # (for UEFI systems only)

  # Note: setting fileSystems is generally not
  # necessary, since nixos-generate-config figures them out
  # automatically in hardware-configuration.nix.
  #fileSystems."/".device = "/dev/disk/by-label/nixos";

  # Enable the OpenSSH server.
  services.sshd.enable = true;
}

:::

Additional installation notes

<xi:include href="installing-usb.section.xml" />
<xi:include href="installing-pxe.section.xml" />
<xi:include href="installing-kexec.section.xml" />
<xi:include href="installing-virtualbox-guest.section.xml" />
<xi:include href="installing-from-other-distro.section.xml" />
<xi:include href="installing-behind-a-proxy.section.xml" />