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How to install Guix ?

This tutorial briefly describes the installation process for the Guix package management tool. It is largely based on the official installation instructions, and we invite you to consult those resources for more details.

The package software manager runs on any modern Linux distribution; it does not run natively on Windows and MacOS as it is not compatible with the kernels of these operating systems. For these platforms, a virtual machine solution such as Apptainer or a Docker container is recommended.

Installation instructions

We recommend using the bash script provided by Guix, which automates all stages of the installation (download, installation and configuration). You will need to have the wget and tar packages installed on your machine. Also note that you will need super-user privileges to run the bash script.

The commands to run to install Ubuntu packages are as follows:

cd /tmp # to move to a temporary folder
wget https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh # to download the installation bash script
chmod +x guix-install.sh # to run the bash script
sudo ./guix-install.sh # to run the bash script

Once the installation is complete, we recommend running the guix pull command to update the list of Guix packages from the main GNU Guix channel. Note that this command takes some time to run. To use the updated Guix daemon, you will then need to run the following lines:

GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.config/guix/current"
. "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"

Installation without super-user rights

Although you do not require any special rights to use Guix, you will need super-user rights to install it:

  • create the /gnu/store where all packages are stored,
  • create isolated software environments for building packages using the Guix daemon.

If you’re interested in this topic, we recommend you have a look at this article or this one. If you do not have super-user privileges on your machine, we advise you to contact your system administrator for installation.

Install on Windows / MacOS

For Windows users, you can use a similar solution to that of Apptainer and use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). However, installing Guix in WSL is far from trivial. We advise you to follow this guide.

For MacOS users, we recommend using a virtual machine or Docker. You can check this link.