Empowered Nix/Guix without root access. The Nix and Guix package managers are incredible useful for software deployment, also on systems where you have no root access.
If the system has gcc, Perl and a few other build tools it may be possible to bootstrap on the target system using ./scripts/nix-bootstrap-home.sh. Alternatively, provided the $HOME path is the same, you can actually build on any host with a similar architecture and running kernel and move the binaries across. Nix is self-contained and depends on very little. That is important to know!
The basic information came from the Nix wiki.
So far, this is the most successful bootstrap route I tried for Nix, and I have tried quite a few ways over time. For Guix the upside is that if Nix works you can simply install Guix from a Nix package. Very easy.
So far, I have managed to install Nix with these scripts on a large CentOS6 compute cluster. When more people have success stories, please add that information here.
Linux version 2.6.32-431.17.1.el6.x86_64 (mockbuild@c6b8.bsys.dev.centos.org) (gcc version 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-4) (GCC) ) #1 SMP Wed May 7 23:32:49 UTC 2014
The easiest way to handle nixpkgs is to checkout a git repository and pass it in to nix-env. Because nix builds dependencies on the full paths it is not possible to use the pre-built binaries anyway.
~/nix-boot/bin/nix-env -f nixpkgs/ -i guix
Another advantage of using a git repository is that you can easily stabilize on the build set you want to deploy (elsewhere). At the moment we use a branch for our lab and a branch for (cloud)biolinux.
GNU Guix is a Nix package which can be installed with
env TMPDIR=/var/tmp/pprins/ ~/nix-boot/bin/nix-env -f nixpkgs/ -i guix
in my opinion this is the easiest way to bootstrap Guix on an existing Linux system without root. Currently I can do
~/nix/store/1qjma0ik7y2lcsgdni9y0hjk435jhhf9-guix-0.3/bin/guix-daemon --listen=$HOME/tmp/guix env GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=$HOME/tmp/guix nix/store/1qjma0ik7y2lcsgdni9y0hjk435jhhf9-guix-0.3/bin/guix package -i vim guix package: error: build failed: creating directory `/nix': Permission denied
The following TODOs are relevant
- Update Guix to recent stable (currently 0.3 in NixPkgs)
- Have Guix use $HOME/nix/store or similar ($localstatedir configure)