Got NixOS running in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

marler8997 · March 25, 2019, 9:39pm

As apart of my journey to learn what Nix can do, I’ve created a Nix rootfs that can be loaded into WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). I’m keeping instructions here:

github.com

marler8997/nix-notes/blob/5f39795a4b8bd9601e31ddb6937b17e0c61f7ba1/NixWsl.md

# Nix for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)


### Create the rootfs

> If you don't already have nix installed, run `curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh` to install it and then `source ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh` to provide access to it in the current shell.

```
cd <some-directory>

mkdir -p etc bin usr/bin root

nix-env --profile root/.nix-profile -iA nixpkgs.coreutils nixpkgs.bash nixpkgs.nix nixpkgs.which nixpkgs.gnutar
# Note: if you want any extra packages feel free to also install them now to the profile

# This next command will limit access only to the tools we installed to our nix profile.
# You may want to start a new shell here so you can easily revert back to your original
# environment by running `exit`.
export PATH=$(realpath -s root/.nix-profile/bin)

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Feel free to try it out, provide experiences, correct me on things.

matthewbauer · March 26, 2019, 8:55pm

Great work! Note that this is just installing the Nix package manager. NixOS is not installed so you won’t be able to use nixos-rebuild / etc. to manage it. It’s still useful and an easy way to get Nix installed. But we definitely could use a WSL module in NixOS to generate this stuff. We already have something similar through boot.isContainer but adding stuff to generate the rootfs.tar.gz would be nice. Ideally we could get all of this on the Microsoft Store as well.

samueldr · March 26, 2019, 10:43pm

See also this previous effort:

GitHub - ghuntley/nixos-wsl-archived: Sample/reference launcher app for WSL distro Microsoft Store packages.
NixOS in Windows Store for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) · Issue #30391 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

Which is apparently blocked by

[nixos] WslRegisterDistributionFailed: 0x800707b - ProcMon - CreateFile NAME INVALID · Issue #3207 · microsoft/WSL · GitHub

It is likely your setup is, too, affected by this; and possible that you haven’t been hit by it yet.

marler8997 · March 27, 2019, 1:07am

Yeah it looks like WSL has issues if you have question mark ‘?’ characters in your path names. In my setup I didn’t have any so I’ve dodged that issue for now.

Thanks for the pointers into what’s already been done, I’ll have to take a look.