'daemon': error: unexpected end-of-file

1

Hi everyone!

Story!

A while ago I put together some code, that you can be found in Nix Effect Pod, to be able to isolate software in containers. In this way I can use the NixOS, and home-manager, configurations inside the container. I am using it for everyday tasks, and even though it’s a bit hacky, it works. However, I am facing an issue while running

${nixos.config.system.build.etcActivationCommands}

where you can find in here. I expect this command activate the /etc directory, by symlinking what’s needed in there, but it causes below problem. By the way, I run it to solve the firefox’s cacert issue, but it caused this problem.

The problem

if you ran

${nixos.config.system.build.etcActivationCommands}

in the image building phase of a container, then run nix-shell inside the container, it will raise

'daemon': error: unexpected end-of-file

error.

Reproduce the problem.

The guide to launch a firefox container is in its README file, but I would just navigate to the firefox directory and load the image by(BE AWARE IT MAY TAKE A LOT OF TIME TO RUN THIS COMMAND)

firefox$ nix-build pod.nix && podman load < result

then run it

$ podman run -td --rm \
  --user $(id -u):$(id -g) --userns keep-id:uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)\
  --name=test firefox-test-machine:latest

and execute

podman exec -it test bash -c 'nix-shell -p zsh'
error: creating directory '/nix/store/.links': Permission denied

However, it’s not the main issue, because in the other containers that are not running etcActivationCommands, like what you can find here I solve this problem by running nix-daemon --daemon & as a root user and it fixes the permission denied one, but in this container if I run

$ podman exec -it --user root test bash
# nix-daemon --daemon &

and in another terminal try the nix-shell

$ podman exec -it test bash
$ nix-shell -p zsh
error:
       … <borked>

         at «none»:0: (source not available)

       … while evaluating a branch condition

         at /nix/store/1v2csf9xir348c89b35idw5svczxln2k-zg8yil5hm8rwk3658p9kncc0fb7mvlby-source/pkgs/stdenv/booter.nix:99:7:

           98|     thisStage =
           99|       if args.__raw or false
             |       ^
          100|       then args'

       (stack trace truncated; use '--show-trace' to show the full trace)

       error: cannot open connection to remote store 'daemon': error: unexpected end-of-file

you can find a similar error in the root terminal now! Btw, if you run something like nix-store --verify --check-contents --repair you get a similar error message.

Expectation

My question is why running etcActivationCommands fixes cacerts, but broke the nix-daemon, and how can I fix that? Thank you for your time.

Feel free to correct me, give me feedback, create issue or PR. Thanks.