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22.1 Requirements

You can easily hack on Guix itself using Guix and Git, which we use for version control (see Building from Git).

But when packaging Guix for foreign distros or when bootstrapping on systems without Guix, and if you decide to not just trust and install our readily made binary (see Binary Installation), you can download a release version of our reproducible source tarball and read on.

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 is available for download from its website at https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/.

GNU Guix depends on the following packages:

• GNU Guile, version 3.0.x, version 3.0.3 or later;
• Guile-Gcrypt, version 0.1.0 or later;
• Guile-GnuTLS (see how to install the GnuTLS bindings for Guile in GnuTLS-Guile)⁴³;
• Guile-SQLite3, version 0.1.0 or later;
• Guile-zlib, version 0.1.0 or later;
• Guile-lzlib;
• Guile-Avahi;
• Guile-Git, version 0.5.0 or later;
• Git (yes, both!);
• Guile-JSON 4.3.0 or later;
• GNU Make.

The following dependencies are optional:

• Support for build offloading (see Using the Offload Facility) and guix copy (see Invoking guix copy) depends on Guile-SSH, version 0.13.0 or later.
• Guile-zstd, for zstd compression and decompression in guix publish and for substitutes (see Invoking guix publish).
• Guile-Semver for the crate importer (see Invoking guix import).
• Guile-Lib for the go importer (see Invoking guix import) and for some of the “updaters” (see Invoking guix refresh).
• When libbz2 is available, guix-daemon can use it to compress build logs.

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

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