Cannot install nix package manager without sudo privileges

suspectum@lemmy.ml to nixos@lemmy.ml – 5 points – 1 years ago

First of all, I'm completely new to Nix and I have no idea what I'm doing. I would like to use it initially as a more general purpose replacement of conda environments for my AI-development workflow. To begin with, I'd like to install nix package manager at my work server where I don't have root access. I tried

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --no-daemon

however it tries to create /nix which I cannot do without sudo. I searched everywhere, but I don't seem to find a way to circumvent this.

Thanks!

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Thanks, this explains it. I'm trying to set up nix-portable now, but it's quite confusing. I downloaded nix-portable binary which is a self-extracting archive that silently unpacked a bunch of files to ~/.nix-portable:

$ ls ~/.nix-portable/bin/
bwrap  proot  zstd

It seems I was meant to run it like so ./nix-portable nix-shell but this does nothing. On my local machine running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed it exists immediately, whereas on my work HPC server it gets stuck.

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