Presumably, you’ve reached this section because either you have installed Guix on top of another distribution (see 安装), or you’ve installed the standalone Guix System (see 系统安装). It’s time for you to get started using Guix and this section aims to help you do that and give you a feel of what it’s like.
Guix is about installing software, so probably the first thing you’ll want to do is to actually look for software. Let’s say you’re looking for a text editor, you can run:
guix search text editor
This command shows you a number of matching packages, each time showing the package’s name, version, a description, and additional info. Once you’ve found out the one you want to use, let’s say Emacs (ah ha!), you can go ahead and install it (run this command as a regular user, no need for root privileges!):
guix install emacs
You’ve installed your first package, congrats! The package is now visible in your default profile, $HOME/.guix-profile—a profile is a directory containing installed packages. In the process, you’ve probably noticed that Guix downloaded pre-built binaries; or, if you explicitly chose to not use pre-built binaries, then probably Guix is still building software (see substitutes, for more info).
Unless you’re using Guix System, the guix install command must
have printed this hint:
hint: Consider setting the necessary environment variables by running:
GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.guix-profile"
. "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
Alternately, see `guix package --search-paths -p "$HOME/.guix-profile"'.
Indeed, you must now tell your shell where emacs and other
programs installed with Guix are to be found. Pasting the two lines above
will do just that: it will add $HOME/.guix-profile/bin—which is
where the installed package is—to the PATH environment variable.
You can paste these two lines in your shell so they take effect right away,
but more importantly you should add them to ~/.bash_profile (or
equivalent file if you do not use Bash) so that environment variables are
set next time you spawn a shell. You only need to do this once and other
search paths environment variables will be taken care of similarly—e.g.,
if you eventually install python and Python libraries,
GUIX_PYTHONPATH will be defined.
You can go on installing packages at your will. To list installed packages, run:
guix package --list-installed
To remove a package, you would unsurprisingly run guix remove. A
distinguishing feature is the ability to roll back any operation you
made—installation, removal, upgrade—by simply typing:
guix package --roll-back
This is because each operation is in fact a transaction that creates a new generation. These generations and the difference between them can be displayed by running:
guix package --list-generations
现在你知道包管理的基本知识了吧！
Going further: See 软件包管理, for more about package management. You may like declarative package management with
guix package --manifest, managing separate profiles with --profile, deleting old generations, collecting garbage, and other nifty features that will come in handy as you become more familiar with Guix. If you are a developer, see 开发 for additional tools. And if you’re curious, see 功能, to peek under the hood.You can also manage the configuration of your entire home environment—your user “dot files”, services, and packages—using Guix Home. See Home Configuration, to learn more about it!
Once you’ve installed a set of packages, you will want to periodically upgrade them to the latest and greatest version. To do that, you will first pull the latest revision of Guix and its package collection:
guix pull
The end result is a new guix command, under
~/.config/guix/current/bin. Unless you’re on Guix System, the first
time you run guix pull, be sure to follow the hint that the
command prints and, similar to what we saw above, paste these two lines in
your terminal and .bash_profile:
GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.config/guix/current" . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile"
You must also instruct your shell to point to this new guix:
hash guix
At this point, you’re running a brand new Guix. You can thus go ahead and actually upgrade all the packages you previously installed:
guix upgrade
As you run this command, you will see that binaries are downloaded (or perhaps some packages are built), and eventually you end up with the upgraded packages. Should one of these upgraded packages not be to your liking, remember you can always roll back!
You can display the exact revision of Guix you’re currently using by running:
guix describe
The information it displays is all it takes to reproduce the exact same Guix, be it at a different point in time or on a different machine.
Going further: See Invoking
guix pull, for more information. See 频道, on how to specify additional channels to pull packages from, how to replicate Guix, and more. You may also findtime-machinehandy (see 调用guix time-machine).
If you installed Guix System, one of the first things you’ll want to do is
to upgrade your system. Once you’ve run guix pull to get the
latest Guix, you can upgrade the system like this:
sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm
Upon completion, the system runs the latest versions of its software packages. Just like for packages, you can always roll back to a previous generation of the whole system. See 入门, to learn how to manage your system.
Now you know enough to get started!
Resources: The rest of this manual provides a reference for all things Guix. Here are some additional resources you may find useful:
- See The GNU Guix Cookbook, for a list of “how-to” style of recipes for a variety of applications.
- The GNU Guix Reference Card lists in two pages most of the commands and options you’ll ever need.
- The web site contains instructional videos covering topics such as everyday use of Guix, how to get help, and how to become a contributor.
- See 文档, to learn how to access documentation on your computer.
We hope you will enjoy Guix as much as the community enjoys building it!