Re: Non-root installs.

[Roel Janssen]

On Sat, 2020-07-25 at 17:02 -0700, Diagon wrote:
> Hey all - I tried on IRC, but was told that this might be a better
> place.  I'm wondering if someone here has experience with a non-root
> install.  Optimally, is there by this point a guix-install.sh for
> non-root?  I know it's doable, eg: 
> https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/GUIX-NO-ROOT.org 
> 
> I was able to get my sysadmin to create a writable /gnu, which I
> gather will allow me to install binaries, rather than recomplie
> everything, since I'll have the right path.  Now that I've read the
> install script, I see that it also uses /var/guix.  Do I need to ask
> for that, or is there a way around it, by putting it in /gnu/var,
> maybe?  I assume I can put /root/.config/guix in my home directory,
> but I also see we need a guixbuild group.  How can I get away without
> this and still run the server manually?
> 
> All input appreciated!
> /D

You can do "export GUIX_STATE_DIRECTORY=/gnu/profiles" to avoid using
/var/guix.

On our cluster install we have a shared /gnu filesystem across our
nodes, and we use one node on which "guix-daemon" runs as root.

On the other nodes we set the following:
export GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=guix://<address>:<port>

That way, you can isolate the "guix-daemon" node, which makes it more
reasonable because now you only need super user privileges on a
specific (isolated) node.

For single-machine instances I don't know how to make this work.

Kind regards,
Roel Janssen