10.6 Invoking guix refresh

The primary audience of the guix refresh command is packagers. As a user, you may be interested in the --with-latest option, which can bring you package update superpowers built upon guix refresh (see --with-latest). By default, guix refresh reports any packages provided by the distribution that are outdated compared to the latest upstream version, like this:

$ guix refresh
gnu/packages/gettext.scm:29:13: gettext would be upgraded from 0.18.1.1 to 0.18.2.1
gnu/packages/glib.scm:77:12: glib would be upgraded from 2.34.3 to 2.37.0

Alternatively, one can specify packages to consider, in which case a warning is emitted for packages that lack an updater:

$ guix refresh coreutils guile guile-ssh
gnu/packages/ssh.scm:205:2: warning: no updater for guile-ssh
gnu/packages/guile.scm:136:12: guile would be upgraded from 2.0.12 to 2.0.13

guix refresh browses the upstream repository of each package and determines the highest version number of the releases therein. The command knows how to update specific types of packages: GNU packages, ELPA packages, etc.—see the documentation for --type below. There are many packages, though, for which it lacks a method to determine whether a new upstream release is available. However, the mechanism is extensible, so feel free to get in touch with us to add a new method!

--recursive

Consider the packages specified, and all the packages upon which they depend.

$ guix refresh --recursive coreutils
gnu/packages/acl.scm:40:13: acl would be upgraded from 2.2.53 to 2.3.1
gnu/packages/m4.scm:30:12: 1.4.18 is already the latest version of m4
gnu/packages/xml.scm:68:2: warning: no updater for expat
gnu/packages/multiprecision.scm:40:12: 6.1.2 is already the latest version of gmp
…

Sometimes the upstream name differs from the package name used in Guix, and guix refresh needs a little help. Most updaters honor the upstream-name property in package definitions, which can be used to that effect:

(define-public network-manager
  (package
    (name "network-manager")
    ;; …
    (properties '((upstream-name . "NetworkManager")))))

When passed --update, it modifies distribution source files to update the version numbers and source tarball hashes of those package recipes (see Defining Packages). This is achieved by downloading each package’s latest source tarball and its associated OpenPGP signature, authenticating the downloaded tarball against its signature using gpgv, and finally computing its hash—note that GnuPG must be installed and in $PATH; run guix install gnupg if needed.

When the public key used to sign the tarball is missing from the user’s keyring, an attempt is made to automatically retrieve it from a public key server; when this is successful, the key is added to the user’s keyring; otherwise, guix refresh reports an error.

The following options are supported:

--expression=expr

-e expr

Consider the package expr evaluates to.

This is useful to precisely refer to a package, as in this example:

guix refresh -l -e '(@@ (gnu packages commencement) glibc-final)'

This command lists the dependents of the “final” libc (essentially all the packages).

--update

-u

Update distribution source files (package recipes) in place. This is usually run from a checkout of the Guix source tree (see Running Guix Before It Is Installed):

$ ./pre-inst-env guix refresh -s non-core -u

See Defining Packages, for more information on package definitions.

--select=[subset]

-s subset

Select all the packages in subset, one of core or non-core.

The core subset refers to all the packages at the core of the distribution—i.e., packages that are used to build “everything else”. This includes GCC, libc, Binutils, Bash, etc. Usually, changing one of these packages in the distribution entails a rebuild of all the others. Thus, such updates are an inconvenience to users in terms of build time or bandwidth used to achieve the upgrade.

The non-core subset refers to the remaining packages. It is typically useful in cases where an update of the core packages would be inconvenient.

--manifest=file

-m file

Select all the packages from the manifest in file. This is useful to check if any packages of the user manifest can be updated.

--type=updater

-t updater

Select only packages handled by updater (may be a comma-separated list of updaters). Currently, updater may be one of:

gnu

the updater for GNU packages;

savannah

the updater for packages hosted at Savannah;

sourceforge

the updater for packages hosted at SourceForge;

gnome

the updater for GNOME packages;

kde

the updater for KDE packages;

xorg

the updater for X.org packages;

kernel.org

the updater for packages hosted on kernel.org;

egg

the updater for Egg packages;

elpa

the updater for ELPA packages;

cran

the updater for CRAN packages;

bioconductor

the updater for Bioconductor R packages;

cpan

the updater for CPAN packages;

pypi

the updater for PyPI packages.

gem

the updater for RubyGems packages.

github

the updater for GitHub packages.

hackage

the updater for Hackage packages.

stackage

the updater for Stackage packages.

crate

the updater for Crates packages.

launchpad

the updater for Launchpad packages.

generic-html

a generic updater that crawls the HTML page where the source tarball of the package is hosted, when applicable.

generic-git

a generic updater for packages hosted on Git repositories. It tries to be smart about parsing Git tag names, but if it is not able to parse the tag name and compare tags correctly, users can define the following properties for a package.

• release-tag-prefix: a regular expression for matching a prefix of the tag name.
• release-tag-suffix: a regular expression for matching a suffix of the tag name.
• release-tag-version-delimiter: a string used as the delimiter in the tag name for separating the numbers of the version.
• accept-pre-releases: by default, the updater will ignore pre-releases; to make it also look for pre-releases, set the this property to #t.

(package
  (name "foo")
  ;; ...
  (properties
    '((release-tag-prefix . "^release0-")
      (release-tag-suffix . "[a-z]?$")
      (release-tag-version-delimiter . ":"))))

For instance, the following command only checks for updates of Emacs packages hosted at elpa.gnu.org and for updates of CRAN packages:

$ guix refresh --type=elpa,cran
gnu/packages/statistics.scm:819:13: r-testthat would be upgraded from 0.10.0 to 0.11.0
gnu/packages/emacs.scm:856:13: emacs-auctex would be upgraded from 11.88.6 to 11.88.9

--list-updaters

List available updaters and exit (see --type above).

For each updater, display the fraction of packages it covers; at the end, display the fraction of packages covered by all these updaters.

In addition, guix refresh can be passed one or more package names, as in this example:

$ ./pre-inst-env guix refresh -u emacs idutils gcc@4.8

The command above specifically updates the emacs and idutils packages. The --select option would have no effect in this case. You might also want to update definitions that correspond to the packages installed in your profile:

$ ./pre-inst-env guix refresh -u \
       $(guix package --list-installed | cut -f1)

When considering whether to upgrade a package, it is sometimes convenient to know which packages would be affected by the upgrade and should be checked for compatibility. For this the following option may be used when passing guix refresh one or more package names:

--list-dependent

-l

List top-level dependent packages that would need to be rebuilt as a result of upgrading one or more packages.

See the reverse-package type of guix graph, for information on how to visualize the list of dependents of a package.

Be aware that the --list-dependent option only approximates the rebuilds that would be required as a result of an upgrade. More rebuilds might be required under some circumstances.

$ guix refresh --list-dependent flex
Building the following 120 packages would ensure 213 dependent packages are rebuilt:
hop@2.4.0 emacs-geiser@0.13 notmuch@0.18 mu@0.9.9.5 cflow@1.4 idutils@4.6 …

The command above lists a set of packages that could be built to check for compatibility with an upgraded flex package.

--list-transitive

List all the packages which one or more packages depend upon.

$ guix refresh --list-transitive flex
flex@2.6.4 depends on the following 25 packages: perl@5.28.0 help2man@1.47.6
bison@3.0.5 indent@2.2.10 tar@1.30 gzip@1.9 bzip2@1.0.6 xz@5.2.4 file@5.33 …

The command above lists a set of packages which, when changed, would cause flex to be rebuilt.

The following options can be used to customize GnuPG operation:

--gpg=command

Use command as the GnuPG 2.x command. command is searched for in $PATH.

--keyring=file

Use file as the keyring for upstream keys. file must be in the keybox format. Keybox files usually have a name ending in .kbx and the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) can manipulate these files (see kbxutil in Using the GNU Privacy Guard, for information on a tool to manipulate keybox files).

When this option is omitted, guix refresh uses ~/.config/guix/upstream/trustedkeys.kbx as the keyring for upstream signing keys. OpenPGP signatures are checked against keys from this keyring; missing keys are downloaded to this keyring as well (see --key-download below).

You can export keys from your default GPG keyring into a keybox file using commands like this one:

gpg --export rms@gnu.org | kbxutil --import-openpgp >> mykeyring.kbx

Likewise, you can fetch keys to a specific keybox file like this:

gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring mykeyring.kbx \
  --recv-keys 3CE464558A84FDC69DB40CFB090B11993D9AEBB5

See --keyring in Using the GNU Privacy Guard, for more information on GPG’s --keyring option.

--key-download=policy

Handle missing OpenPGP keys according to policy, which may be one of:

always

Always download missing OpenPGP keys from the key server, and add them to the user’s GnuPG keyring.

never

Never try to download missing OpenPGP keys. Instead just bail out.

interactive

When a package signed with an unknown OpenPGP key is encountered, ask the user whether to download it or not. This is the default behavior.

--key-server=host

Use host as the OpenPGP key server when importing a public key.

--load-path=directory

-L directory

Add directory to the front of the package module search path (see Package Modules).

This allows users to define their own packages and make them visible to the command-line tools.

The github updater uses the GitHub API to query for new releases. When used repeatedly e.g. when refreshing all packages, GitHub will eventually refuse to answer any further API requests. By default 60 API requests per hour are allowed, and a full refresh on all GitHub packages in Guix requires more than this. Authentication with GitHub through the use of an API token alleviates these limits. To use an API token, set the environment variable GUIX_GITHUB_TOKEN to a token procured from https://github.com/settings/tokens or otherwise.