[demo] Portable Nix

[Matthew Bauer]

Frequently I have to work on computers without Nix installed and no
root access to install it. The primary motivation of "nix-bundle" was
to build Nix derivations to run on these systems. Will Dietz's recent
work on "static" Nix and Musl has made this experience much better.

Starting today, I am releasing a "nix" binary that will run without a
Nix store. It's available at the following URL and can be run on
x86_64-linux:

https://matthewbauer.us/nix

It contains Nix 2.0 in a self-contained shell script and is only about
10MB! You can pass it Nix commands directly like this (obviously
insecure):

```
curl https://matthewbauer.us/nix | sh -s -- run -f
channel:nixos-unstable hello -c hello
```

It's a little slow to start, but a neat proof of concept. Please try
out lots of derivations especially graphical things like Firefox,
Emacs, etc. The issues will helps us improve the experience.

[Guillaume Girol]

Hello,

Is it supposed to work on a kernel without user namespace support ?
I tried on a Centos 7.4 and got:
$ mkdir -p /tmp/blah/store
$ mkdir -p /tmp/blah/var/nix
$ NIX_STORE_DIR=/tmp/blah/store NIX_LOCALSTATE_DIR=/tmp/blah/var
NIX_STATE_DIR=/tmp/blah/var/nix NIX_REMOTE= NIX_CONF_DIR=/tmp/blah
NIX_LOG_DIR=/tmp /tmp/static_nix build -f channel:nixos-18.03 nix
unshare(): Invalid argument

The error message comes even before starting dowloading the channel.
I get the same error message when adding --sandbox false.

Anyway, thanks for this neat thing :)
Guillaume Girol

[zimbatm]

Thanks for working on this Matt. Do you have the build instructions available somewhere?

Over at https://github.com/nix-community/docker-nix we worked to produce a more modern and self-contained Nix docker image.

One issue is that if the /nix/store is mounted as a volume (to share the cache),  nix-env and nix-shell disappear. It would be great if all the nix utilities could be provided outside of the store to support that scenario.

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[Matthew Bauer]

> Is it supposed to work on a kernel without user namespace support ?

Not currently. It's made with nix-bundle which uses unshare and user
namespaces. We definitely need more clear error handling though.

In the past, I had experimented with alternatives to unshare, but it
never seemed to work right. PRoot seemed to be the most promising
though.

[Matthew Bauer]

> Do you have the build instructions available somewhere?

Forgot to mention this! Not exactly build instructions, but everything
is from this branch in nix-bundle:
https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle/pull/35

You can build it from that tree with "nix-build nix.nix". "result"
will be a nix-bundle file that you can copy outside of the Nix store.
For it to build in a reasonable amount of time, you will need to add
the ALLVM binary cache which has Musl binaries. See
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/34645 under "Quickstart with
Binary Cache".

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nix-devel/CANEP-f7Mf%3DNVtjm5AkrYfiSJyZKXUH9zAUYD35M2wUAu-XisuQ%40mail.gmail.com.