I’m trying to follow the wiki instructions with NixOS and start using flakes, but I’m running into so many errors I think I’ve missed some important prerequisite.
I’m on nixos-unstable.
I added the
{ pkgs, ... }: {
nix = {
package = pkgs.nixUnstable;
extraOptions = ''
experimental-features = nix-command flakes
'';
};
}
to my configuration.nix and that rebuilt fine. But the example command from the Tweag tutorial fails:
marcus@ione> nix shell github:edolstra/dwarffs --command dwarffs --version
error: --- Error ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
cannot open SQLite database '/home/marcus/.cache/nix/fetcher-cache-v1.sqlite'
That DB does not exist. I thought I would be cunning, went and found the DB’s schema in the nix source and create the DB myself. With the flakes-enabled version of nix:
marcus@ione> nix run nixpkgs.sqlite
error: --- SysError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
getting status of '/home/marcus/nixpkgs.sqlite': No such file or directory
marcus@ione> nix-shell -p sqlite3
error: --- UndefinedVarError ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix-shell
at: (1:94) from string
1| with import <nixpkgs> { }; (pkgs.runCommandCC or pkgs.runCommand) "shell" { buildInputs = [ (sqlite3) ]; } ""
| ^
undefined variable 'sqlite3'
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
The above command has a typo, should have been sqlite, not sqlite3. Note the different error when I use the correct attribute:
marcus@ione> nix run nixpkgs.sqlite
error: --- SysError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
getting status of '/home/marcus/nixpkgs.sqlite': No such file or directory
So I rolled back to a previous NixOS generation, got the database created, went back to the current generation with flakes enabled, but still:
marcus@ione> nix shell github:edolstra/dwarffs --command dwarffs --version
error: --- SQLiteError ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
executing SQLite statement 'insert or replace into Cache(input, info, path, immutable, timestamp) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)': attempt to write a readonly database (in '/home/marcus/.cache/nix/fetcher-cache-v1.sqlite')
chmod 777 on the DB, still same error.
Lots of people seem to be using flakes already, so I guess I’m doing something wrong, anyone got any advice?
