nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/release-notes/rl-1909.section.md

Release 19.09 ("Loris", 2019/10/09)

Highlights

In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:

• End of support is planned for end of April 2020, handing over to 20.03.

• Nix has been updated to 2.3; see its release notes.

• Core version changes:

  systemd: 239 -> 243

  gcc: 7 -> 8

  glibc: 2.27 (unchanged)

  linux: 4.19 LTS (unchanged)

  openssl: 1.0 -> 1.1

• Desktop version changes:

  plasma5: 5.14 -> 5.16

  gnome3: 3.30 -> 3.32

• PHP now defaults to PHP 7.3, updated from 7.2.

• PHP 7.1 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 19.09 release.

• The binfmt module is now easier to use. Additional systems can be added through boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems. For instance, boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "wasm32-wasi" "x86_64-windows" "aarch64-linux" ]; will set up binfmt interpreters for each of those listed systems.

• The installer now uses a less privileged nixos user whereas before we logged in as root. To gain root privileges use sudo -i without a password.

• We've updated to Xfce 4.14, which brings a new module services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce4-14. If you'd like to upgrade, please switch from the services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce module as it will be deprecated in a future release. They're incompatibilities with the current Xfce module; it doesn't support thunarPlugins and it isn't recommended to use services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce and services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce4-14 simultaneously or to downgrade from Xfce 4.14 after upgrading.

• The GNOME 3 desktop manager module sports an interface to enable/disable core services, applications, and optional GNOME packages like games.

  • services.gnome3.core-os-services.enable

  • services.gnome3.core-shell.enable

  • services.gnome3.core-utilities.enable

  • services.gnome3.games.enable

  With these options we hope to give users finer grained control over their systems. Prior to this change you'd either have to manually disable options or use environment.gnome3.excludePackages which only excluded the optional applications. environment.gnome3.excludePackages is now unguarded, it can exclude any package installed with environment.systemPackages in the GNOME 3 module.

• Orthogonal to the previous changes to the GNOME 3 desktop manager module, we've updated all default services and applications to match as close as possible to a default reference GNOME 3 experience.

  The following changes were enacted in services.gnome3.core-utilities.enable

  • accerciser

  • dconf-editor

  • evolution

  • gnome-documents

  • gnome-nettool

  • gnome-power-manager

  • gnome-todo

  • gnome-tweaks

  • gnome-usage

  • gucharmap

  • nautilus-sendto

  • vinagre

  • cheese

  • geary

  The following changes were enacted in services.gnome3.core-shell.enable

  • gnome-color-manager

  • orca

  • services.avahi.enable

New Services

The following new services were added since the last release:

• ./programs/dwm-status.nix

• The new hardware.printers module allows to declaratively configure CUPS printers via the ensurePrinters and ensureDefaultPrinter options. ensurePrinters will never delete existing printers, but will make sure that the given printers are configured as declared.

• There is a new services.system-config-printer.enable and programs.system-config-printer.enable module for the program of the same name. If you previously had system-config-printer enabled through some other means you should migrate to using one of these modules.

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome3

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon

  • services.xserver.desktopManager.mate Note Mate uses programs.system-config-printer as it doesn't use it as a service, but its graphical interface directly.

• services.blueman.enable has been added. If you previously had blueman installed via environment.systemPackages please migrate to using the NixOS module, as this would result in an insufficiently configured blueman.

Backward Incompatibilities

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:

• Buildbot no longer supports Python 2, as support was dropped upstream in version 2.0.0. Configurations may need to be modified to make them compatible with Python 3.

• PostgreSQL now uses /run/postgresql as its socket directory instead of /tmp. So if you run an application like eg. Nextcloud, where you need to use the Unix socket path as the database host name, you need to change it accordingly.

• PostgreSQL 9.4 is scheduled EOL during the 19.09 life cycle and has been removed.

• The options services.prometheus.alertmanager.user and services.prometheus.alertmanager.group have been removed because the alertmanager service is now using systemd's DynamicUser mechanism which obviates these options.

• The NetworkManager systemd unit was renamed back from network-manager.service to NetworkManager.service for better compatibility with other applications expecting this name. The same applies to ModemManager where modem-manager.service is now called ModemManager.service again.

• The services.nzbget.configFile and services.nzbget.openFirewall options were removed as they are managed internally by the nzbget. The services.nzbget.dataDir option hadn't actually been used by the module for some time and so was removed as cleanup.

• The services.mysql.pidDir option was removed, as it was only used by the wordpress apache-httpd service to wait for mysql to have started up. This can be accomplished by either describing a dependency on mysql.service (preferred) or waiting for the (hardcoded) /run/mysqld/mysql.sock file to appear.

• The services.emby.enable module has been removed, see services.jellyfin.enable instead for a free software fork of Emby. See the Jellyfin documentation: Migrating from Emby to Jellyfin

• IPv6 Privacy Extensions are now enabled by default for undeclared interfaces. The previous behaviour was quite misleading --- even though the default value for networking.interfaces.*.preferTempAddress was true, undeclared interfaces would not prefer temporary addresses. Now, interfaces not mentioned in the config will prefer temporary addresses. EUI64 addresses can still be set as preferred by explicitly setting the option to false for the interface in question.

• Since Bittorrent Sync was superseded by Resilio Sync in 2016, the bittorrentSync, bittorrentSync14, and bittorrentSync16 packages have been removed in favor of resilio-sync.

  The corresponding module, services.btsync has been replaced by the services.resilio module.

• The httpd service no longer attempts to start the postgresql service. If you have come to depend on this behaviour then you can preserve the behavior with the following configuration: systemd.services.httpd.after = [ "postgresql.service" ];

  The option services.httpd.extraSubservices has been marked as deprecated. You may still use this feature, but it will be removed in a future release of NixOS. You are encouraged to convert any httpd subservices you may have written to a full NixOS module.

  Most of the httpd subservices packaged with NixOS have been replaced with full NixOS modules including LimeSurvey, WordPress, and Zabbix. These modules can be enabled using the services.limesurvey.enable, services.mediawiki.enable, services.wordpress.enable, and services.zabbixWeb.enable options.

• The option systemd.network.networks.<name>.routes.*.routeConfig.GatewayOnlink was renamed to systemd.network.networks.<name>.routes.*.routeConfig.GatewayOnLink (capital L). This follows upstreams renaming of the setting.

• As of this release the NixOps feature autoLuks is deprecated. It no longer works with our systemd version without manual intervention.

  Whenever the usage of the module is detected the evaluation will fail with a message explaining why and how to deal with the situation.

  A new knob named nixops.enableDeprecatedAutoLuks has been introduced to disable the eval failure and to acknowledge the notice was received and read. If you plan on using the feature please note that it might break with subsequent updates.

  Make sure you set the _netdev option for each of the file systems referring to block devices provided by the autoLuks module. Not doing this might render the system in a state where it doesn't boot anymore.

  If you are actively using the autoLuks module please let us know in issue #62211.

• The setopt declarations will be evaluated at the end of /etc/zshrc, so any code in programs.zsh.interactiveShellInit, programs.zsh.loginShellInit and programs.zsh.promptInit may break if it relies on those options being set.

• The prometheus-nginx-exporter package now uses the offical exporter provided by NGINX Inc. Its metrics are differently structured and are incompatible to the old ones. For information about the metrics, have a look at the official repo.

• The shibboleth-sp package has been updated to version 3. It is largely backward compatible, for further information refer to the release notes and upgrade guide.

  Nodejs 8 is scheduled EOL under the lifetime of 19.09 and has been dropped.

• By default, prometheus exporters are now run with DynamicUser enabled. Exporters that need a real user, now run under a seperate user and group which follow the pattern <exporter-name>-exporter, instead of the previous default nobody and nogroup. Only some exporters are affected by the latter, namely the exporters dovecot, node, postfix and varnish.

• The ibus-qt package is not installed by default anymore when i18n.inputMethod.enabled is set to ibus. If IBus support in Qt 4.x applications is required, add the ibus-qt package to your environment.systemPackages manually.

• The CUPS Printing service now uses socket-based activation by default, only starting when needed. The previous behavior can be restored by setting services.cups.startWhenNeeded to false.

• The services.systemhealth module has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

• The services.mantisbt module has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

• Squid 3 has been removed and the squid derivation now refers to Squid 4.

• The services.pdns-recursor.extraConfig option has been replaced by services.pdns-recursor.settings. The new option allows setting extra configuration while being better type-checked and mergeable.

• No service depends on keys.target anymore which is a systemd target that indicates if all NixOps keys were successfully uploaded. Instead, <key-name>-key.service should be used to define a dependency of a key in a service. The full issue behind the keys.target dependency is described at NixOS/nixpkgs#67265.

  The following services are affected by this:

  • services.dovecot2

  • services.nsd

  • services.softether

  • services.strongswan

  • services.strongswan-swanctl

  • services.httpd

• The security.acme.directory option has been replaced by a read-only security.acme.certs.<cert>.directory option for each certificate you define. This will be a subdirectory of /var/lib/acme. You can use this read-only option to figure out where the certificates are stored for a specific certificate. For example, the services.nginx.virtualhosts.<name>.enableACME option will use this directory option to find the certs for the virtual host.

  security.acme.preDelay and security.acme.activationDelay options have been removed. To execute a service before certificates are provisioned or renewed add a RequiredBy=acme-${cert}.service to any service.

  Furthermore, the acme module will not automatically add a dependency on lighttpd.service anymore. If you are using certficates provided by letsencrypt for lighttpd, then you should depend on the certificate service acme-${cert}.service> manually.

  For nginx, the dependencies are still automatically managed when services.nginx.virtualhosts.<name>.enableACME is enabled just like before. What changed is that nginx now directly depends on the specific certificates that it needs, instead of depending on the catch-all acme-certificates.target. This target unit was also removed from the codebase. This will mean nginx will no longer depend on certificates it isn't explicitly managing and fixes a bug with certificate renewal ordering racing with nginx restarting which could lead to nginx getting in a broken state as described at NixOS/nixpkgs#60180.

• The old deprecated emacs package sets have been dropped. What used to be called emacsPackagesNg is now simply called emacsPackages.

• services.xserver.desktopManager.xterm is now disabled by default if stateVersion is 19.09 or higher. Previously the xterm desktopManager was enabled when xserver was enabled, but it isn't useful for all people so it didn't make sense to have any desktopManager enabled default.

• The WeeChat plugin pkgs.weechatScripts.weechat-xmpp has been removed as it doesn't receive any updates from upstream and depends on outdated Python2-based modules.

• Old unsupported versions (logstash5, kibana5, filebeat5, heartbeat5, metricbeat5, packetbeat5) of the ELK-stack and Elastic beats have been removed.

• For NixOS 19.03, both Prometheus 1 and 2 were available to allow for a seamless transition from version 1 to 2 with existing setups. Because Prometheus 1 is no longer developed, it was removed. Prometheus 2 is now configured with services.prometheus.

• Citrix Receiver (citrix_receiver) has been dropped in favor of Citrix Workspace (citrix_workspace).

• The services.gitlab module has had its literal secret options (services.gitlab.smtp.password, services.gitlab.databasePassword, services.gitlab.initialRootPassword, services.gitlab.secrets.secret, services.gitlab.secrets.db, services.gitlab.secrets.otp and services.gitlab.secrets.jws) replaced by file-based versions (services.gitlab.smtp.passwordFile, services.gitlab.databasePasswordFile, services.gitlab.initialRootPasswordFile, services.gitlab.secrets.secretFile, services.gitlab.secrets.dbFile, services.gitlab.secrets.otpFile and services.gitlab.secrets.jwsFile). This was done so that secrets aren't stored in the world-readable nix store, but means that for each option you'll have to create a file with the same exact string, add "File" to the end of the option name, and change the definition to a string pointing to the corresponding file; e.g. services.gitlab.databasePassword = "supersecurepassword" becomes services.gitlab.databasePasswordFile = "/path/to/secret_file" where the file secret_file contains the string supersecurepassword.

  The state path (services.gitlab.statePath) now has the following restriction: no parent directory can be owned by any other user than root or the user specified in services.gitlab.user; i.e. if services.gitlab.statePath is set to /var/lib/gitlab/state, gitlab and all parent directories must be owned by either root or the user specified in services.gitlab.user.

• The networking.useDHCP option is unsupported in combination with networking.useNetworkd in anticipation of defaulting to it. It has to be set to false and enabled per interface with networking.interfaces.<name>.useDHCP = true;

• The Twitter client corebird has been dropped as it is discontinued and does not work against the new Twitter API. Please use the fork cawbird instead which has been adapted to the API changes and is still maintained.

• The nodejs-11_x package has been removed as it's EOLed by upstream.

• Because of the systemd upgrade, systemd-timesyncd will no longer work if system.stateVersion is not set correctly. When upgrading from NixOS 19.03, please make sure that system.stateVersion is set to "19.03", or lower if the installation dates back to an earlier version of NixOS.

• Due to the short lifetime of non-LTS kernel releases package attributes like linux_5_1, linux_5_2 and linux_5_3 have been removed to discourage dependence on specific non-LTS kernel versions in stable NixOS releases. Going forward, versioned attributes like linux_4_9 will exist for LTS versions only. Please use linux_latest or linux_testing if you depend on non-LTS releases. Keep in mind that linux_latest and linux_testing will change versions under the hood during the lifetime of a stable release and might include breaking changes.

• Because of the systemd upgrade, some network interfaces might change their name. For details see upstream docs or our ticket.

Other Notable Changes

• The documentation module gained an option named documentation.nixos.includeAllModules which makes the generated configuration.nix 5 manual page include all options from all NixOS modules included in a given configuration.nix configuration file. Currently, it is set to false by default as enabling it frequently prevents evaluation. But the plan is to eventually have it set to true by default. Please set it to true now in your configuration.nix and fix all the bugs it uncovers.

• The vlc package gained support for Chromecast streaming, enabled by default. TCP port 8010 must be open for it to work, so something like networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 8010 ]; may be required in your configuration. Also consider enabling Accelerated Video Playback for better transcoding performance.

• The following changes apply if the stateVersion is changed to 19.09 or higher. For stateVersion = "19.03" or lower the old behavior is preserved.

  • solr.package defaults to pkgs.solr_8.

• The hunspellDicts.fr-any dictionary now ships with fr_FR.{aff,dic} which is linked to fr-toutesvariantes.{aff,dic}.

• The mysql service now runs as mysql user. Previously, systemd did execute it as root, and mysql dropped privileges itself. This includes ExecStartPre= and ExecStartPost= phases. To accomplish that, runtime and data directory setup was delegated to RuntimeDirectory and tmpfiles.

• With the upgrade to systemd version 242 the systemd-timesyncd service is no longer using DynamicUser=yes. In order for the upgrade to work we rely on an activation script to move the state from the old to the new directory. The older directory (prior 19.09) was /var/lib/private/systemd/timesync.

  As long as the system.config.stateVersion is below 19.09 the state folder will migrated to its proper location (/var/lib/systemd/timesync), if required.

• The package avahi is now built to look up service definitions from /etc/avahi/services instead of its output directory in the nix store. Accordingly the module avahi now supports custom service definitions via services.avahi.extraServiceFiles, which are then placed in the aforementioned directory. See avahi.service5 for more information on custom service definitions.

• Since version 0.1.19, cargo-vendor honors package includes that are specified in the Cargo.toml file of Rust crates. rustPlatform.buildRustPackage uses cargo-vendor to collect and build dependent crates. Since this change in cargo-vendor changes the set of vendored files for most Rust packages, the hash that use used to verify the dependencies, cargoSha256, also changes.

  The cargoSha256 hashes of all in-tree derivations that use buildRustPackage have been updated to reflect this change. However, third-party derivations that use buildRustPackage may have to be updated as well.

• The consul package was upgraded past version 1.5, so its deprecated legacy UI is no longer available.

• The default resample-method for PulseAudio has been changed from the upstream default speex-float-1 to speex-float-5. Be aware that low-powered ARM-based and MIPS-based boards will struggle with this so you'll need to set hardware.pulseaudio.daemon.config.resample-method back to speex-float-1.

• The phabricator package and associated httpd.extraSubservice, as well as the phd service have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

• The mercurial httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

• The trac httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs because it was unmaintained.

• The foswiki package and associated httpd.extraSubservice have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

• The tomcat-connector httpd.extraSubservice has been removed from nixpkgs.

• It's now possible to change configuration in services.nextcloud after the initial deploy since all config parameters are persisted in an additional config file generated by the module. Previously core configuration like database parameters were set using their imperative installer after creating /var/lib/nextcloud.

• There exists now lib.forEach, which is like map, but with arguments flipped. When mapping function body spans many lines (or has nested maps), it is often hard to follow which list is modified.

  Previous solution to this problem was either to use lib.flip map idiom or extract that anonymous mapping function to a named one. Both can still be used but lib.forEach is preferred over lib.flip map.

  The /etc/sysctl.d/nixos.conf file containing all the options set via boot.kernel.sysctl was moved to /etc/sysctl.d/60-nixos.conf, as sysctl.d5 recommends prefixing all filenames in /etc/sysctl.d with a two-digit number and a dash to simplify the ordering of the files.

• We now install the sysctl snippets shipped with systemd.

  • Loose reverse path filtering

  • Source route filtering

  • fq_codel as a packet scheduler (this helps to fight bufferbloat)

  This also configures the kernel to pass core dumps to systemd-coredump, and restricts the SysRq key combinations to the sync command only. These sysctl snippets can be found in /etc/sysctl.d/50-*.conf, and overridden via boot.kernel.sysctl (which will place the parameters in /etc/sysctl.d/60-nixos.conf).

• Core dumps are now processed by systemd-coredump by default. systemd-coredump behaviour can still be modified via systemd.coredump.extraConfig. To stick to the old behaviour (having the kernel dump to a file called core in the working directory), without piping it through systemd-coredump, set systemd.coredump.enable to false.

• systemd.packages option now also supports generators and shutdown scripts. Old systemd.generator-packages option has been removed.

• The rmilter package was removed with associated module and options due deprecation by upstream developer. Use rspamd in proxy mode instead.

• systemd cgroup accounting via the systemd.enableCgroupAccounting option is now enabled by default. It now also enables the more recent Block IO and IP accounting features.

• We no longer enable custom font rendering settings with fonts.fontconfig.penultimate.enable by default. The defaults from fontconfig are sufficient.

• The crashplan package and the crashplan service have been removed from nixpkgs due to crashplan shutting down the service, while the crashplansb package and crashplan-small-business service have been removed from nixpkgs due to lack of maintainer.

  The redis module was hardcoded to use the redis user, /run/redis as runtime directory and /var/lib/redis as state directory. Note that the NixOS module for Redis now disables kernel support for Transparent Huge Pages (THP), because this features causes major performance problems for Redis, e.g. (https://redis.io/topics/latency).

• Using fonts.enableDefaultFonts adds a default emoji font noto-fonts-emoji.

  • services.xserver.enable

  • programs.sway.enable

  • programs.way-cooler.enable

  • services.xrdp.enable

• The altcoins categorization of packages has been removed. You now access these packages at the top level, ie. nix-shell -p dogecoin instead of nix-shell -p altcoins.dogecoin, etc.

• Ceph has been upgraded to v14.2.1. See the release notes for details. The mgr dashboard as well as osds backed by loop-devices is no longer explicitly supported by the package and module. Note: There's been some issues with python-cherrypy, which is used by the dashboard and prometheus mgr modules (and possibly others), hence 0000-dont-check-cherrypy-version.patch.

• pkgs.weechat is now compiled against pkgs.python3. Weechat also recommends to use Python3 in their docs.