2.2 Requirements

This section lists requirements when building Guix from source. The build procedure for Guix is the same as for other GNU software, and is not covered here. Please see the files README and INSTALL in the Guix source tree for additional details.

GNU Guix is available for download from its website at https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/.

GNU Guix depends on the following packages:

• GNU Guile, version 3.0.x;
• Guile-Gcrypt, version 0.1.0 or later;
• GnuTLS, specifically its Guile bindings (see how to install the GnuTLS bindings for Guile in GnuTLS-Guile);
• Guile-SQLite3, version 0.1.0 or later;
• Guile-zlib, version 0.1.0 or later;
• Guile-lzlib;
• Guile-Avahi;
• Guile-Git, version 0.5.0 or later;
• Guile-JSON 4.3.0 or later;
• GNU Make.

The following dependencies are optional:

• Support for build offloading (see Daemon Offload Setup) and guix copy (see Invoking guix copy) depends on Guile-SSH, version 0.13.0 or later.
• Guile-zstd, for zstd compression and decompression in guix publish and for substitutes (see Invoking guix publish).
• Guile-Semver for the crate importer (see Invoking guix import).
• Guile-Lib for the go importer (see Invoking guix import) and for some of the “updaters” (see Invoking guix refresh).
• When libbz2 is available, guix-daemon can use it to compress build logs.

Unless --disable-daemon was passed to configure, the following packages are also needed:

• GNU libgcrypt;
• SQLite 3;
• GCC’s g++, with support for the C++11 standard.

When configuring Guix on a system that already has a Guix installation, be sure to specify the same state directory as the existing installation using the --localstatedir option of the configure script (see localstatedir in GNU Coding Standards). Usually, this localstatedir option is set to the value /var. The configure script protects against unintended misconfiguration of localstatedir so you do not inadvertently corrupt your store (see The Store).