2.1 Binary Installation

This section describes how to install Guix from a self-contained tarball providing binaries for Guix and for all its dependencies. This is often quicker than installing from source, described later (see Building from Git).

Important: This section only applies to systems without Guix. Following it for existing Guix installations will overwrite important system files.

Some GNU/Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE provide Guix through their own package managers. The version of Guix may be older than e0d920b but you can update it afterwards by running ‘guix pull’.

For Debian or a derivative such as Ubuntu, call:

sudo apt install guix

Likewise, on openSUSE:

sudo zypper install guix

The Guix project also provides a shell script, guix-install.sh, which automates the binary installation process without use of a foreign distro package manager⁵. Use of guix-install.sh requires Bash, GnuPG, GNU tar, wget, and Xz.

The script guides you through the following:

• Downloading and extracting the binary tarball
• Setting up the build daemon
• Making the ‘guix’ command available to non-root users
• Configuring substitute servers

As root, run:

# cd /tmp
# wget https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh
# chmod +x guix-install.sh
# ./guix-install.sh

Note: By default, guix-install.sh will configure Guix to download pre-built package binaries, called substitutes (see Substitutes), from the project’s build farms. If you choose not to permit this, Guix will build everything from source, making each installation and upgrade very expensive. See On Trusting Binaries for a discussion of why you may want to build packages from source.

To use substitutes from bordeaux.guix.gnu.org, ci.guix.gnu.org or a mirror, you must authorize them. For example,

# guix archive --authorize < \
     ~root/.config/guix/current/share/guix/bordeaux.guix.gnu.org.pub
# guix archive --authorize < \
     ~root/.config/guix/current/share/guix/ci.guix.gnu.org.pub

When you’re done installing Guix, see Application Setup for extra configuration you might need, and Getting Started for your first steps!

Note: The binary installation tarball can be (re)produced and verified simply by running the following command in the Guix source tree:

make guix-binary.system.tar.xz

... which, in turn, runs:

guix pack -s system --localstatedir \
  --profile-name=current-guix guix

See Invoking guix pack, for more info on this handy tool.

Should you eventually want to uninstall Guix, run the same script with the --uninstall flag:

./guix-install.sh --uninstall

With --uninstall, the script irreversibly deletes all the Guix files, configuration, and services.