2.2 Requirements

This section lists requirements when building Guix from source. The build procedure for Guix is the same as for other GNU software, and is not covered here. Please see the files README and INSTALL in the Guix source tree for additional details.

GNU Guix depends on the following packages:

• GNU Guile, version 2.0.7 or later;
• GNU libgcrypt;
• GNU Make.

The following dependencies are optional:

• Installing Guile-JSON will allow you to use the guix import pypi command (see Invoking guix import). It is of interest primarily for developers and not for casual users.
• Installing GnuTLS-Guile will allow you to access https URLs with the guix download command (see Invoking guix download), the guix import pypi command, and the guix import cpan command. This is primarily of interest to developers. See how to install the GnuTLS bindings for Guile in GnuTLS-Guile.

Unless --disable-daemon was passed to configure, the following packages are also needed:

• SQLite 3;
• libbz2;
• GCC’s g++, with support for the C++11 standard.

When a working installation of the Nix package manager is available, you can instead configure Guix with --disable-daemon. In that case, Nix replaces the three dependencies above.

Guix is compatible with Nix, so it is possible to share the same store between both. To do so, you must pass configure not only the same --with-store-dir value, but also the same --localstatedir value. The latter is essential because it specifies where the database that stores metadata about the store is located, among other things. The default values for Nix are --with-store-dir=/nix/store and --localstatedir=/nix/var. Note that --disable-daemon is not required if your goal is to share the store with Nix.