Install on MacOS High Sierra fails after interrupting first install

[pboyer]

On my first install of nix, I interrupted it as it seemed to be busy establishing what turned out to be 32 "build users". This has left the system in a permanently broken state.

I presently get this error when trying to install nix.

It seems the build user nixbld25 already exists, but with the UID
with the UID ''. This script can't really handle that right
now, so I'm going to give up.

If you already created the users and you know they start from
 and go up from there, you can edit this script and change
NIX_FIRST_BUILD_UID near the top of the file to  and try
again.

We'd love to help if you need it.

If you can, open an issue at https://github.com/nixos/nix/issues

Or feel free to contact the team,
 - on IRC #nixos on irc.freenode.net
 - on twitter @nixos_org

There is no directory /nix. /var/empty is empty. There is no ~/.nix_profile directory. I really don't understand where the residual state for this install is, but I can't clean it up.

[pboyer]

Fixed. I found and deleted a number of files like this:

/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/nixbld*.plist

I found the install script very confusing for more than one reason:

1. What the heck are build users? Why are we making 32 of them?
2. The script gives confusing or hard to follow suggestions. From the error: you can edit this script and change NIX_FIRST_BUILD_UID near the top of the file to and try again. But the suggested install process pulls what appears to be a nested doll of scripts. Which script am I supposed to edit? I appreciate the friendly tone of the error messages, but it's more important to provide pertinent, concise information than anything and these errors do not at present achieve that.
3. The install script provides no mention of these files being created. I had to find . -name "*nix*" to find them.
4. The install script evidently is not able to roll back from interruption. This seems like a rather fundamental issue, particularly in an install script that is touching so much of the file system.

[manveru]

Just had another guy in IRC who faced issues with NIX_FIRST_BUILD_UID, since he tried to install Nix on a machine with over 30000 users. It'd be nice if the script could use

readonly NIX_FIRST_BUILD_UID="${NIX_FIRST_BUILD_UID:-30001}"

To make configuration of this variable possible without having to unpack the whole thing and modify stuff. Can anyone point out problems with this approach? I'm not sure if this is supported by all shells...

Otherwise telling the user what the first free UID is would also be helpful

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[stale]

I closed this issue due to inactivity. → More info