Installation works in fish shell, but then it's not usable

[Jiehong]

Hi,

Installing nix from a fish shell (Archlinux), seems to work at first, but nix is then not usable.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Start an OS and use a fish shell (in my case: Archlinux)
2. Install nix with the official installation process: curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
3. This will work and show the following message:

installing 'nix-2.3.7'
unpacking channels...

Installation finished!  To ensure that the necessary environment
variables are set, either log in again, or type

  . /home/vagrant/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh

in your shell.

4. Running . /home/vagrant/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh reveals it's not working, because fish is not sh. The following error message is given:

~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh (line 6): Unsupported use of '='. In fish, please use 'set NIX_LINK $HOME/.nix-profile'.
from sourcing file ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh
        called on line 185 of file /usr/share/fish/config.fish
in function '.' with arguments '/home/user/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh'
source: Error while reading file “/home/user/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh”

Expected behaviour

The installation process should detect the default shell, and/or provide a profile for other shells (aka nix.fish inside /home/user/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/)

[stale]

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

[domenkozar]

Reported in digitallyinduced/ihp#819

[Kineolyan]

Hello, I just wrote a translation that seems to work for fish. Do you want me to open a PR with this?

[domenkozar]

Yup.

[Kineolyan]

Hello everyone, I submitted PR #4689 for this topic. The code has been approved so far, but I was lacking experience on nix build system to properly write tests. If you want to chime in with your expertise, that would be great. Otherwise, I let the good people from nix project decide what to do with the PR.

[stale]

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

[danielb2]

I'd like to be able to use nix with fish. how's this coming ?

[samlaf]

Same here. Would be nice to support fish.

[danielb2]

There really isn't much to initialize to make it usable in fish, so I don't see why this ticket is open so long.

to boot, @Jiehong has already provided the code. C'mon nix people ...

[jordigarcl]

I followed the installation tutorial and expected Nix to support fish since set up seemingly completed succesfully. It would be great to have this.

[Kineolyan]

My PR here is still working #4689
I have been using it for more than a year and I am still using it.
However, as mentioned in the final comments, I did not know what to do to add a test, and no one was suggesting solutions nor accepting to merge 🤷
Feel free to copy-paste the additional file 😄

[danielb2]

My PR here is still working #4689 I have been using it for more than a year and I am still using it. However, as mentioned in the final comments, I did not know what to do to add a test, and no one was suggesting solutions nor accepting to merge 🤷 Feel free to copy-paste the additional file 😄

this is the one I use. Did you address their feedback there about the line at the end? Doesn't look like it

[Kineolyan]

Looking again at @Jiehong PR, there is this comment:

See #440. The main problem with adding fish support is that it will quickly get out of sync with the bash profile script, since the maintainers (e.g. me) don't use fish.

So it is likely that there will actually be no fish support. Not dsicussing with any maintainer, I cannot say how hard it is to maintain such integration.
Anyway, at the moment, I updated my PR, just in case.

[charego]

Close this as well? #7014 has been merged.