opening lock file '/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/home-manager.lock': No such file or directory

[emils0]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

When installing home-manager on a non-NixOS Linux Distro, I am encountering an error during installation.

$ nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install

Creating initial Home Manager generation...

/nix/store/sgbp7cxbaclil0jchnrswqhjdsp5bfv7-home-manager-generation
Starting Home Manager activation
error: opening lock file '/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/home-manager.lock': No such file or directory
Uh oh, the installation failed! Please create an issue at

    https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues

if the error seems to be the fault of Home Manager.

This fails consistently, and I have attempted to install it on multiple distros inside of WSL, including Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch.

A friend of mine is also experiencing this exact issue, but he's running Fedora on bare-metal, so this does not seem to be exclusively happening on WSL.

I have also tried installing home-manager on both multi-user Nix installs, and single-user, but the result is the same.

Maintainer CC

No response

System information

- system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 5.10.16.3-microsoft-standard-WSL2, Arch Linux, noversion, rolling`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.14.1`
 - nixpkgs: `/root/.nix-defexpr/channels/nixpkgs`

[ncfavier]

This is a consequence of #2544, which is starting to cause issues with Nix 2.14 because the default profile location changed, see NixOS/nix#7930.

[propet]

I'm on a Kali linux host, and I could solve this issue by doing:

mkdir -m 0755 -p /nix/var/nix/{profiles,gcroots}/per-user/$USER

[rycee]

Thanks for the report! I'll try to get this resolved over the weekend.

[thiagokokada]

A similar issue also happens before 2.14 when you try use the store located in ~/.local/share/nix/root, that is done automatically since 2.10 if you don't have permissions to write in /nix (see: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-2-10-0-released/20291). This is ideal for using Home-Manager inside systems that have / in read-only mode, like Steam Deck.

So having this bug fixed can be interesting since it would mean that we could have Home-Manager running in almost any Linux system that supports user-namespaces and have access to Nix static binaries. This also means things like https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot/ (that is unmaintained right now) wouldn't be necessary anymore (at least for the Home-Manager use case).

[rycee]

@thiagokokada Hmm, wouldn't setting NIX_STATE_DIR work in that case?

[thiagokokada]

@thiagokokada Hmm, wouldn't setting NIX_STATE_DIR work in that case?

No, for two reasons:

• If you set NIX_STATE_DIR globally (like export NIX_STATE_DIR=~/.local/share/nix/var/nix, it makes nix assume that the store is once again localized in /nix/store (I think this is a bug in nix, not sure yet). Once it tries to write it fails.
• If you set only for the activation script, it goes further but stops later for some other reason that I didn't had enough time to debug yet.