doc/manual/source/installation/installing-binary.md
Updating to macOS 15 Sequoia
If you recently updated to macOS 15 Sequoia and are getting
consoleerror: the user '_nixbld1' in the group 'nixbld' does not existwhen running Nix commands, refer to GitHub issue NixOS/nix#10892 for instructions to fix your installation without reinstalling.
To install the latest version Nix, run the following command:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
This performs the default type of installation for your platform:
We recommend the multi-user installation if it supports your platform and you can authenticate with sudo.
The installer can be configured with various command line arguments and environment variables. To show available command line flags:
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh -s -- --help
To check what it does and how it can be customised further, download and edit the second-stage installation script.
Version-specific installation URLs for all Nix versions since 1.11.16 can be found at releases.nixos.org. The directory for each version contains the corresponding SHA-256 hash.
All installation scripts are invoked the same way:
$ export VERSION=2.19.2
$ curl -L https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/install | sh
The multi-user Nix installation creates system users and a system service for the Nix daemon.
Supported systems:
To explicitly instruct the installer to perform a multi-user installation on your system:
$ bash <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon
You can run this under your usual user account or root.
The script will invoke sudo as needed.
To explicitly select a single-user installation on your system:
$ bash <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --no-daemon
In a single-user installation, /nix is owned by the invoking user.
The script will invoke sudo to create /nix if it doesn’t already exist.
If you don’t have sudo, manually create /nix as root:
$ su root
# mkdir /nix
# chown alice /nix
You can also download a binary tarball that contains Nix and all its dependencies:
Example
console$ pushd $(mktemp -d) $ export VERSION=2.19.2 $ export SYSTEM=x86_64-linux $ curl -LO https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-$VERSION/nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz $ tar xfj nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM.tar.xz $ cd nix-$VERSION-$SYSTEM $ ./install $ popd
The installer can be customised with the environment variables declared in the file named install-multi-user.
The Nix community maintains installers for some Linux distributions in their native packaging format(https://nix-community.github.io/nix-installers/).
[]{#sect-macos-installation-change-store-prefix}[]{#sect-macos-installation-encrypted-volume}[]{#sect-macos-installation-symlink}[]{#sect-macos-installation-recommended-notes}
We believe we have ironed out how to cleanly support the read-only root file system on modern macOS. New installs will do this automatically.
This section previously detailed the situation, options, and trade-offs, but it now only outlines what the installer does. You don't need to know this to run the installer, but it may help if you run into trouble:
/etc/synthetic.conf to direct macOS to create a "synthetic"
empty root directory to mount your volume/etc/fstab
rw: read-writenoauto: prevent the system from auto-mounting the volume (so the
LaunchDaemon mentioned below can control mounting it, and to avoid
masking problems with that mounting service).nobrowse: prevent the Nix Store volume from showing up on your
desktop; also keeps Spotlight from spending resources to index
this volume