Environment Variables
To use Nix, some environment variables should be set. In particular,
PATH
should contain the directories prefix/bin
and
~/.nix-profile/bin
. The first directory contains the Nix tools
themselves, while ~/.nix-profile
is a symbolic link to the current
user environment (an automatically generated package consisting of
symlinks to installed packages). The simplest way to set the required
environment variables is to include the file
prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh
in your ~/.profile
(or similar), like
this:
source prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh
NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
If you need to specify a custom certificate bundle to account for an
HTTPS-intercepting man in the middle proxy, you must specify the path to
the certificate bundle in the environment variable NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
.
If you don't specify a NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
manually, Nix will install
and use its own certificate bundle.
Set the environment variable and install Nix
$ export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
In the shell profile and rc files (for example, /etc/bashrc
,
/etc/zshrc
), add the following line:
export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt
Note
You must not add the export and then do the install, as the Nix installer will detect the presence of Nix configuration, and abort.
NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
with macOS and the Nix daemon
On macOS you must specify the environment variable for the Nix daemon service, then restart it:
$ sudo launchctl setenv NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE /etc/ssl/my-certificate-bundle.crt
$ sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.nixos.nix-daemon
Proxy Environment Variables
The Nix installer has special handling for these proxy-related
environment variables: http_proxy
, https_proxy
, ftp_proxy
,
no_proxy
, HTTP_PROXY
, HTTPS_PROXY
, FTP_PROXY
, NO_PROXY
.
If any of these variables are set when running the Nix installer, then
the installer will create an override file at
/etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service.d/override.conf
so nix-daemon
will use them.