I was wondering if there would be any issues with installing Nix and Homebrew on the same system?
I know Homebrew tends to install things all over different directories, but from what I have read, Nix is very clean. If I understand this correctly, Nix installs it's packages all within one single directory.
So if this is the case, could I try running them both side-by-side? I would be careful not to install too many of the same packages from both places in (ie. I wouldn't install grep, htop, or whatever else from both Homebrew and Nix and if I did I would take precautions).
Side-note: This would not be permanent. I am thinking about switching from Homebrew to Nix (just to mix things up a bit), and I wanted to try Nix on my main machine before taking the leap (if at all). I know I could just try Nix on a VM, but I would not get the same experience unless I tried it on my main system. So it would be nice to install it along Homebrew and give it a shot before going through the pains of removing Homebrew and replacing all my Homebrew packages with Nix packages.
Yes, you can install Nix along side Homebrew.
Nix will install all it's packages within /nix/store For example, on my NixOS system vim is currently installed in /nix/store/j6nrk9h1rpxrzmccm0yq520ik625gd1q-vim-8.1.0578
Your shell will choose whether to use a package from Nix or Homebrew, according to how $PATH is set up. For example, if it so happens that the Nix paths are first, then they will take precedence.
Note
A common source of confusion is that install means something different on Nix. When you install a package, such as Python, it becomes part of a Nix environment, and as such can be executed without specifying the full path; Just as you'd expect from any package manager.
However, if you install a package which has, say, Python, as a dependency, Python would get installed, but more likely than not it would not be included in the environment. Hence it can only be executed via the absolute path.
On a related note, due to a similar reason, if you install a library with Nix and then try to compile against it outside of Nix, it will not work; The build tools will not find the library.
Related
Im trying to get something running in a lab, and I need to install a whole bunch of packages to compile the code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev libwx-perl libmodule-build-perl git cpanminus libextutils-cppguess-perl libboost-all-dev libxmu-dev liblocal-lib-perl wx-common libopengl-perl libwx-glcanvas-perl libtbb-dev libxmu-dev freeglut3-dev libwxgtk-media3.0-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libextutils-makemaker-cpanfile-perl
The problem is, I'm working on a Mac; So I only have brew available - and the package names are not equivalent.
Am I trying to do something dumb and impossible, or is there a way to cross reference those apt-get packages to ones available in brew and install those so I can build the app?
For added context, its a modified "slicer" application for generating files that a 3d printer uses to make parts. I could fire up an ubuntu VM and use apt-get, but I'm on an M1 mac at the moment and recompiling experimental QEMU code just so I can fire up an ubuntu VM takes me way more out of my depth than I already am... I'm running brew on a duplicated, rosetta emulation forced terminal.
There is no straightforward way to automatically figure out whether a corresponding Homebrew package exists for each of these packages, no. But you can probably guess the majority, and manually figure out the rest. Each Debian package has a link to the upstream sources, and a home page if one exists, from which you can often find links to packages for other architectures, etc.
From the Debian package search page you can search e.g. for the libxmu-dev package, and discover the corresponding package page for Buster (the current stable Debian release), which in turn has links to the upstream repo, etc. But this is an X11 package, so it's not straightforwardly compatible with macOS, which uses an entirely different GUI architecture.
I switched recently to the Nix package manager instead of Homebrew for OS X.
Usually, I install it with rbenv like:
brew install rbenv
rbenv install 2.2.0
I am asking myself now how does one do it with Nix? I've heard Nix itself is a good enough package manager, so maybe I can get rid of rbenv for handling my ruby version?
When I install ruby via Nix
nix-env -i ruby
Even when OS X recognises it:
$ which ruby
/Users/USERNAME/.nix-profile/bin/ruby
I am still getting a Permission denied error when trying to:
gem install sass
Would you still recommend rbenv for handling ruby installations? I
know I could just chown the Nix folder, but I should own it anyway.
I've had similar experience using python with nix.
Generally the approach when using nix is NOT to:
Install a language specific package manager for some version of a language (gem, pip, ...)
Use that language specific package manager to install libraries
Instead the nix way (from what I've learned) to do things is:
Install all already packaged applications with nix
If you are developing an application, instead of installing the libraries your application depends on via nix (or gem), you define a nix expression that describes your applications dependencies and use it as a development environment. (I think the documentation should be improved in this matter.)
Generally don't install libraries on their own and manually refer to those in some third-party build process. (This works in some scenarios, as in compiled C/C++ libraries, where dependencies of the libraries are built into them via RPATHs. But this does not work well with e.g. python packages.) In the end what you really want is the application, not the library!
You can find some documentation on how to set up such environments in the official nixpkgs documentation, mostly covering Haskell at the moment, but Ruby should be similar.
you can found package of ruby by following
nix-env -qa ruby
and then it will shows list of ruby versions
nix-env -i ruby-2.1.0-p0
This will install ruby version then check it by ruby -v
I have Ipython installed but it runs on python 2.7.5 , I also have python 3.3 installed. How can I make changes such that Ipython runs on python 3.3 not 2.7.5?
You need to install pip for Python 3 - it's as easy as going to the pip-installer.org Installation page and following the instructions. Briefly, download get-pip.py and save it someplace, like your Downloads folder. Navigate there in Terminal, and run
sudo python3 get-pip.py
and you should soon have either a pip3 or pip-3.3 command (maybe both, I don't remember). You should now be able to run
sudo pip3 install ipython[all]
and hopefully all the dependencies will be installed as well. If installation chokes, use pip3 to install pyzmq, tornado, pyreadline, jinja2, pygments, and maybe a few others. Make sure you read the docs before you start, so you have an idea of what you're trying to achieve. IPython is large and quite complex, with many moving parts, so in the absence of a package manager (see below) it can take a bit of time before everything is up and running.
The Package Manager Way
There are other options, too. You can install Anaconda, a "Completely free enterprise-ready Python distribution for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing" with over 100 packages, including IPython and its dependencies. By default, the Anaconda installer gives you Python 2.7, but you can use the conda command to install Python 3.
My personal favorite is to install Python 3 and IPython using MacPorts. Yes, it'll install Py3 all over again, but unless you're really starving for disk space (in which case you probably don't want to be installing large packages like IPython) it's no big deal. Using the port command, once the base MacPorts installation has been put in place, you can just run
sudo port install py33-ipython +pyqt4
and all the other dependencies will be taken care of, (hopefully) flawlessly, without your having to do anything else except wait for a long time while things like PyQt are compiled. You may also need to run sudo port install py33-ipython +notebook if you want the notebook, I don't recall if it's installed otherwise. BTW, you do need X11, Xcode, and the Xcode command-line tools for MacPorts, but they would likely be required if you do the first option as not all packages have binaries available for OS X. The excellent documentation walks you through everything, from installation to using the port command to maintaining your system. I would highly recommend modifying your ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, or equivalent for your shell) to add the MacPorts install directories (/opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin, by default) to the front of your path. Just add export PATH='/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH' to the end of the file.
A third alternative option is to use Homebrew. It's similar to MacPorts, in that the brew command is a type of package manager like port and conda, but in my experience it doesn't have as many packages, and doesn't quite work as seamlessly as port. However, my observations on StackOverflow, Ask Different and other fora seem to indicate that about 50% of people have great experiences with brew and don't like port, while the other half loves port over brew. YMMV.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your installation!
I try to install scipy on my mac 10.6.8 but always have problem with it. I've installed ipython (sudo /usr/bin/easy_install-2.6 ipython) and numpy (python setup.py build/install), but when I installed scipy by the same way, I got always this error message:
RuntimeError: Running cythonize failed!
Could someone tell me how to solve this problem?
Have you tried using the binaries provided for OSX? That should ensure everything works.
EDIT
The easiest way I've found to keep package dependencies under control is to use MacPorts as much as possible because unlike Homebrew, the packages are designed to work together and dependencies are (almost always) automagically installed when you try to install something.
So, first, install MacPorts using the installer for Snow Leopard. Choose the option to install ports in a unique directory like /opt/local, so they don't conflict with whatever built-in versions the OS depends on. Also, ensure that /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin are added to your $PATH before the system directories like /usr/bin, /bin, /sbin etc. so that when you run python from the command prompt you get the version you want. Your ~/.profile should have something like export PATH="/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH as its last line.
After MacPorts has been installed, you may want to restart just for fun to ensure that all of your environment variable are set up properly. Start Terminal.app (or your favorite replacement) and enter which port, which should return /opt/local/bin/port if everything worked correctly. Next, run sudo port selfupdate just to make sure everything is synced properly. Once that is done, we can install python and some modules. port allows you to pass a list of ports to be installed, so a command like sudo port install foo bar baz will install the latest versions of the foo, bar, and baz ports, along with any dependencies they may require, in the correct order. Some ports have binary distributions, and others are compiled as needed, so the first time you run it there may be a lot of dependencies to install. A nice feature of MacPorts is that you can have multiple versions of some packages installed at the same time, and you can switch between them if needed. Also, if port search is giving too many results, the online search engine can help you find what you're looking for.
To get a decent IPython-based Python 2 development environment going, you'll need the following:
python27
py27-ipython
py27-numpy
py27-scipy
py27-matplotlib (if you like drawing pretty pictures, but mainly so you can get pylab)
py27-pandas (DataFrames are your friend!)
and perhaps py27-pyqt4 if you run ipython via the qtconsole option
I'd also install py-pip and py27-distribute so you can install modules on your own if there is no MacPort version.
Finally, if you're a forward-looking person and want to use numpy et al. on Python 3, MacPorts has you covered! There are py32- and py33-based versions of all of the above packages except scipy, which is only py32 for now. However, I was able to install it just fine with pip, although I have a whole bunch of other devel tools on my machine, and I'm running 10.8.2, so YMMV.
Good luck!
How to use macports and homebrew package management systems together without having them interfere with each other in bad ways?
It's best to use just a single package manager and uninstall the others. If, for example, you want to use MacPorts, but there's a program you need that's not in MacPorts, consider filing a MacPorts port request ticket.
If you insist that you must install multiple package managers, then please install all of them in nonstandard prefixes. MacPorts' default prefix is /opt/local. Homebrew defaults to /usr/local. Fink uses /sw. Build each package manager from source manually, selecting a unique install prefix for each that is different from all of the preceding default paths. This is to ensure that software packages that have hardcoded knowledge of these package managers' default paths do not inadvertently find dependencies from the wrong package manager.
When you install a port with MacPorts, it clears most environment variables; this is to ensure that, even if you have, say, /usr/local/bin and /sw/bin in $PATH, MacPorts will not find things there. I don't know whether Homebrew and Fink do this too; if they don't, change your $PATH so that it doesn't contain locations with potential third-party dependencies, before you install anything using Homebrew or Fink.