How to reinstall nix on macos

2024-10-12

Sources

• https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1402
• How to completely remove Nix from OS X

Steps

• Take a deep breath
• Remove Nix from launchd (see /Library/LaunchDaemons and ~/Library/LaunchDaemons)
• This doesn’t exist
• Remove nix from /etc/synthetic.conf
• Need to sudo vim this
• Remove nix from /etc/fstab (use vifs). Just run the vifs command in a terminal located in the /etc folder.
• edit this and remove the line with vim
• May have to grand access w/ inspector if sudo doesn’t work
• Remove Nix from shell (e.g. ~/.zshrc)
• Go into disk utility and erase the Nix volume, then delete apfs volume
• (good time to reboot)
• Delete symlinks rm -rf ~/.nix-*
• Remove Nix user group (once again not sure how to with shell, can System Preferences > Users & Groups covers this)
• Remove users with sudo dscl . delete /Users/_nixbld1
• Remove any nix traces in ~/Applications
• Remove .nix* files in ~/, ~/.config and ~/.cache
• Remove /etc/nix
• Remove .nix* files in /var/root/ and /var/root/.cache
• Cleanup /etc/bashrc, /etc/zshrc using your backup files if you have one. Backups look like bashrc.backup-before-nix and zshrc.backup-before-nix

  # This is what your .bashrc should look like
  # System-wide .bashrc file for interactive bash(1) shells.
  if [ -z "$PS1" ]; then
     return
  fi

  PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '
  # Make bash check its window size after a process completes
  shopt -s checkwinsize

  [ -r "/etc/bashrc_$TERM_PROGRAM" ] && . "/etc/bashrc_$TERM_PROGRAM"

• Cleanup /etc/zshrc
• What do you mean here
• As a final cleanup step, replace <YOUR_USER> with your user, and run sudo rm -rf /etc/nix /nix /var/root/.nix-profile /var/root/.nix-defexpr /var/root/.nix-channels /Users/<YOUR_USER>/.nix-profile /Users/<YOUR_USER>/.nix-defexpr /Users/<YOUR_USER>/.nix-channels
• Run this, if it fails, try again

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L \
  https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install

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