General Commands Manual

Warning
This program is experimental and its interface is subject to change.

Name¶

nix derivation add - Add a store derivation

Synopsis¶

nix derivation add [option…]

Description¶

This command reads from standard input a JSON representation of a store derivation.

Store derivations are used internally by Nix. They are store paths with extension .drv that represent the build-time dependency graph to which a Nix expression evaluates.

nix derivation add takes a single derivation in the following format:

Derivation JSON Format¶

Warning

This JSON format is currently experimental and subject to change.

The JSON serialization of a derivations is a JSON object with the following fields:

name: The name of the derivation. This is used when calculating the store paths of the derivation’s outputs.
outputs: Information about the output paths of the derivation. This is a JSON object with one member per output, where the key is the output name and the value is a JSON object with these fields:

path: The output path, if it is known in advanced. Otherwise, null.
method: For an output which will be [content addressed], a string representing the method of content addressing that is chosen. Valid method strings are:
flat
nar
text
git

: Otherwise, null.

hashAlgo: For an output which will be [content addressed], the name of the hash algorithm used. Valid algorithm strings are:
blake3
md5
sha1
sha256
sha512
hash: For fixed-output derivations, the expected content hash in base-16.

: Example

"outputs": {


  "out": {


    "path": "/nix/store/2543j7c6jn75blc3drf4g5vhb1rhdq29-source",


    "method": "nar",


    "hashAlgo": "sha256",


    "hash": "6fc80dcc62179dbc12fc0b5881275898f93444833d21b89dfe5f7fbcbb1d0d62"


  }
}

inputSrcs: A list of store paths on which this derivation depends.
inputDrvs: A JSON object specifying the derivations on which this derivation depends, and what outputs of those derivations.

: Example

"inputDrvs": {


  "/nix/store/6lkh5yi7nlb7l6dr8fljlli5zfd9hq58-curl-7.73.0.drv": ["dev"],


  "/nix/store/fn3kgnfzl5dzym26j8g907gq3kbm8bfh-unzip-6.0.drv": ["out"]
}

: specifies that this derivation depends on the dev output of curl, and the out output of unzip.

system: The system type on which this derivation is to be built (e.g. x86_64-linux).
builder: The absolute path of the program to be executed to run the build. Typically this is the bash shell (e.g. /nix/store/r3j288vpmczbl500w6zz89gyfa4nr0b1-bash-4.4-p23/bin/bash).
args: The command-line arguments passed to the builder.
env: The environment passed to the builder.
structuredAttrs: Strucutured Attributes, only defined if the derivation contains them. Structured attributes are JSON, and thus embedded as-is.