`nix run` does not install unfree packages, NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE doesn't seem to help

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1

When I try to use nix run to try out Postman via nix run nixpkgs#postman I get the following output:

Package ‘postman-7.36.1’ in /nix/store/vyivf65nczfgh51qwiw50m8pgr0p9yna-source/pkgs/development/web/postman/default.nix:98 has an unfree license (‘postman’), refusing to evaluate.

a) To temporarily allow unfree packages, you can use an environment variable
   for a single invocation of the nix tools.

     $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1

b) For `nixos-rebuild` you can set
  { nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true; }
in configuration.nix to override this.

Alternatively you can configure a predicate to allow specific packages:
  { nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
      "postman"
    ];
  }

c) For `nix-env`, `nix-build`, `nix-shell` or any other Nix command you can add
  { allowUnfree = true; }
to ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix.

(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

Makes sense. The problem is, the suggested mitigations don’t work. I tried prepending NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 to the command, using an export directly as suggested, and my ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix file already has allowUnfree = true; set.

I did see this topic but I don’t think it applies here, since my problem is that an error message seems to be giving me bad information.

Can you help me figure out what’s going wrong? Thanks!

roni

2

These instructions do not work with flakes. You should use stable nix or run it with --impure flag so it could load environment variables or config.nix. Try nix run nixpkgs#postman --impure.

2 Likes
3

Thank you, that worked!