Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

I’ve documented installation from the binary tarball (which I plan to
distribute for the next release) in commit 09722b1.  Please let me know
what you think.

Ludo’.


2.1 Binary Installation
=======================

This section describes how to install Guix on an arbitrary system from a
self-contained tarball providing binaries for Guix and for all its
dependencies.  This is often quicker than installing from source, which
is described in the next sections.  The only requirement is to have
GNU tar and Xz.

   Installing goes along these lines:

  1. Download the binary tarball from
     ‘ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz’(1),
     where SYSTEM is ‘x86_64-linux’ for an ‘x86_64’ machine already
     running the kernel Linux, and so on.

  2. As ‘root’, run:

          # cd /
          # tar xf guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz

     This creates ‘/gnu/store’ (*note The Store::), ‘/var/guix’, and
     ‘/root/.guix-profile’.  ‘/root/.guix-profile’ is a ready-to-use
     profile for ‘root’ where Guix is installed.

  3. Setup the daemon as explained below (*note Setting Up the
     Daemon::), and run it:

          # /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon --build-users-group=guix-builder

  4. Make the ‘guix’ command available to other users on the machine,
     for instance with:

          # mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
          # cd /usr/local/bin
          # ln -s /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix

   And that’s it!

   There are two things to note.  First, don’t unpack the tarball on a
working Guix system since that would overwrite its own essential files.
Second, the ‘guix’ package must remain available in ‘root’’s profile, or
it would become subject to garbage collection—in which case you would
find yourself badly handicapped by the lack of the ‘guix’ command.

   The tarball in question can be (re)produced simply by running the
following command in the Guix source tree:

     make guix-binary.SYSTEM.tar.xz

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) As usual, make sure to download the associated ‘.sig’ file and to
verify the authenticity of the tarball against it!