3.6 Invoking guix pull

Packages are installed or upgraded to the latest version available in the distribution currently available on your local machine. To update that distribution, along with the Guix tools, you must run guix pull: the command downloads the latest Guix source code and package descriptions, and deploys it.

On completion, guix package will use packages and package versions from this just-retrieved copy of Guix. Not only that, but all the Guix commands and Scheme modules will also be taken from that latest version. New guix sub-commands added by the update also become available⁵.

The guix pull command is usually invoked with no arguments, but it supports the following options:

--verbose

Produce verbose output, writing build logs to the standard error output.

--url=url

Download the source tarball of Guix from url.

By default, the tarball is taken from its canonical address at gnu.org, for the stable branch of Guix.

--bootstrap

Use the bootstrap Guile to build the latest Guix. This option is only useful to Guix developers.