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Set up Guix for new users

This document describes how to set up Guix for new users on a machine in which Guix is already installed (such as octopus01).

Create a per-user profile for yourself by running your first guix pull

"Borrow" some other user's guix to run guix pull. In the example below, we use root's guix, but it might as well be any guix.

$ /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix/bin/guix pull

This should create your very own Guix profile at ~/.config/guix/current. You may invoke guix from this profile as

$ ~/.config/guix/current/bin/guix ...

But, you'd normally want to make this more convenient. So, add ~/.config/guix/current/bin to your PATH. To do this, add the following to your ~/.profile

GUIX_PROFILE=~/.config/guix/current
. $GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile

Thereafter, you may run any guix command simply as

$ guix ...

Pulling from a different channels.scm

By default, guix pull pulls the latest commit of the main upstream Guix channel. You may want to pull from additional channels as well. Put the channels you want into ~/.config/guix/channels.scm, and then run guix pull. For example, here's a channels.scm if you want to use the guix-bioinformatics channel.

$ cat ~/.config/guix/channels.scm
(list (channel
       (name 'gn-bioinformatics)
       (url "https://git.genenetwork.org/guix-bioinformatics")
       (branch "master")))

And,

$ guix pull