status-mobile/nix

Description

This folder contains configuration for Nix, a purely functional package manager used by the Status app for its build process.

Configuration

The main config file is nix/nix.conf and its main purpose is defining the binary caches which allow download of packages to avoid having to compile them yourself locally.

NOTE: If you are in Asia you might want to add the https://nix-cache-cn.status.im/ to be first in order of substituters. Removing cache.nixos.org could also help.

Shell

In order to access an interactive Nix shell a user should run make shell.

The Nix shell is started in this repo via the nix/shell.sh script, which is a wrapper around the nix-shell command and is intended for use with our main Makefile. This allows for an implicit use of nix-shell as the default shell in the Makefile.

By default the shell starts without any specific target platform, if you want to change that you should export the TARGET_OS env variable with the right value:

make shell TARGET_OS=android

This way your shell and all other nix commands should run in a setup that is tailored towards Android development.

For valid values you can check the nix/platform.nix file.

Known Issues

MacOS 10.15 "Catalina"

There is an unsolved issue with the root(/) file system in 10.15 being read-only: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

Our current recommended workaround is putting /nix under /opt/nix and symlinking it via /etc/synthetic.conf:

sudo mkdir /opt/nix
sudo chown ${USER} /opt/nix
sudo sh -c "echo 'nix\t/opt/nix' >> /etc/synthetic.conf"
reboot

After the system reboots you should see the /nix symlink in place:

 % ls -l /nix
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  8 Oct 11 13:53 /nix -> /opt/nix

In order to be able to use Nix with a symlinked /nix you need to include this in your shell:

export NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE=1

Add it to your .bashrc or any other shell config file.

NOTE: Your old /nix directory will end up in /Users/Shared/Relocated Items/Security/nix after OS upgrade.