Getting around no-symlink policy

Development
1

Hi,

I managed to set up nix on my macos with an external-drive symlink to /nix. Everything seems to work up to some point. When I ran nix-shell on some project I’m working on, it started to download packages and build something, but after some time it failed with

"Bundling (...)"
warning: unknown setting 'allow-symlinked-store'
warning: unknown setting 'experimental-features'
warning: unknown setting 'extra-experimental-features'
error: the path '/nix' is a symlink; this is not allowed for the Nix store and its parent directories
rewrite-libs: ProcFailed {procCommand = "nix-store", procArguments = ["-r","/nix/store/i0zac1vw0ra6g2mg701m3kc9xbi24lgg-zlib-1.2.11/lib/libz.dylib"], procExitCode = ExitFailure 1}
error: builder for (...) failed with exit code 1
error: build of (...) failed

Neither export NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE=1 nor setting up allow-symlinked-store = true in nix.conf seem to work (the latter seems to be unknown although mentioned by official docs).

Does anyone know a solution to this?

2

Seems to be an old nix, version 2.3 or older.

3 
mateusz@Mateuszs-MacBook-Pro ~ % nix --version
nix (Nix) 2.9.1

Installed today from official bindist.

4

That nix was not what spit out those log messages, that was one thats 2.3 or older.

More is hard to say without knowing anything about your expression.

5

I’m running nix-shell inside of GitHub - IntersectMBO/plutus-apps: The Plutus application platform. It seems that the nix-2.3.16 is indeed installed in the process. You’re saying that it gets invoked sometime during evaluation? How to trace which component depends on that old version?

6

Mount the drive to /nix rather than sylinking. That’s how a regular Nix installation looks like since Catalina, just with an APFS Volume rather than a separate drive.

7

I’ll try that, thanks a lot!