Originally forked from pjotrp/nix-no-root. Successfully builds Nix 2.0.4 with no root access as of September 2018.

Unfortunately, the official binary cache won't work with any path except /nix. And since you have to compile anyway, might as well also fork nixpkgs now and use your version to stabilize your builds:

git clone http://github.com/yourusername/nixpkgs.git
export NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=$PWD/nixpkgs

(Later, you can rebase from an upstream channel branch)

Then install config.nix and edit to your liking.

Finally, run the script. It takes two arguments: a temporary directory for compiling the bootstrap version, and the final nix directory where everything will eventually go. The final directory must be the same as in your config.nix. Other args are passed to the last nix-env command. You probably want to add -j to use all processors. If you have existing Nix binaries, make sure to remove them from your PATH to prevent errors. This was my full invocation:

# provided by the Berkeley cluster environment
# you may need to find your equivalents
module load gcc/6.3.0
module load boost/1.66.0

./nix-no-root.sh \
  /clusterfs/rosalind/users/jefdaj/nix-boot /clusterfs/rosalind/users/jefdaj/nix2 \
  -j$(nproc) --keep-going --show-trace 2>&1 | tee nix-no-root.log

That will take a long time to run. Afterward, the last step is to symlink ~/.nix-profile to var/nix/profiles/default in your nix dir, and add something like this to your .bashrc:

module load gcc/6.3.0
module load boost/1.66.0
export NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=$HOME/nixpkgs
source $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh
# This works around a Nix bug. Does it break anything?
unset LIBRARY_PATH
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Congratulations. You made it! Please add your version info here, or message me and I will!

Things that should work, but I haven't tried:

• install Nix, then install Guix with nix-env -i guix
• build on another host with same path + similar architecture and running kernel, then move the binaries