How can I provide libpcre to a build outside of Nix?

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1

I’m working on a project built with Nim that requires libpcre. There is no point in Nix-ifying it because it’s an external project that I just want to build to verify my change works.

I tried setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/nix/store/xyz...abc-pcre-8.44/lib/

But it doesn’t help:

/nix/store/abc...xyz-binutils-2.31.1/bin/ld: cannot find -lpcre

What is the proper way of providing a library to a local build that isn’t a derivation?

2

You should consider building insude a nix developpment environment, a.k.a a nix shell, from the nix-shell command used to do so.

$ nix-shell -p pcre # or pcre2, pcre-cpp, as you wish
[nix-shell:~]$ ./confiugure; make # or whatever nim requires

You should stuff all your dependencies on that invocation. Like gcc, nim and the like. If you feel lucky, add the --pure argument to the nix-shell invocation. This will hide your global environment, and thus fail if you missed dependencies on the command line.

If you are curious, have a look at all the environment variables that nix-shell changes with this zsh command:

git diff --no-index  =(env | sort) =(nix-shell -p pcre --command env | sort)
1 Like
3

You’re absolutely right. I managed to build the project using:

nix-shell --pure -p gcc nim pcre which

Sweet.

4

gcc shouldn’t be necessary in your nix-shell as it implicitly gets introduced through stdenv

IIRC, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is to modify the runtime linking behavior, and wouldn’t affect a build

1 Like
5

Ah, good point. Thanks!