6.1 Specifying Additional Channels

You can specify additional channels to pull from. To use a channel, write ~/.config/guix/channels.scm to instruct guix pull to pull from it in addition to the default Guix channel(s):

;; Add variant packages to those Guix provides.
(cons (channel
        (name 'variant-packages)
        (url "https://example.org/variant-packages.git"))
      %default-channels)

Note that the snippet above is (as always!) Scheme code; we use cons to add a channel the list of channels that the variable %default-channels is bound to (see cons and lists in GNU Guile Reference Manual). With this file in place, guix pull builds not only Guix but also the package modules from your own repository. The result in ~/.config/guix/current is the union of Guix with your own package modules:

$ guix describe
Generation 19	Aug 27 2018 16:20:48
  guix d894ab8
    repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
    branch: master
    commit: d894ab8e9bfabcefa6c49d9ba2e834dd5a73a300
  variant-packages dd3df5e
    repository URL: https://example.org/variant-packages.git
    branch: master
    commit: dd3df5e2c8818760a8fc0bd699e55d3b69fef2bb

The output of guix describe above shows that we’re now running Generation 19 and that it includes both Guix and packages from the variant-packages channel (see Invoking guix describe).