Nix lockFileMaintenance is broken

[budimanjojo]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of Renovate you run.

No response

If you're self-hosting Renovate, select which platform you are using.

github.com

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of the platform you run.

No response

Was this something which used to work for you, and then stopped?

It used to work, and then stopped

Describe the bug

I'm using GitHub Action to run Renovate, it's been 2 weeks that I haven't got a flake.lock PR from renovate so I decided to take a look. Seems like there's a problem with the buildpack docker container. Below is the relevant log that I suspect is causing the problem.

Relevant debug logs

2023-03-19T01:41:16.3827385Z  WARN: Error updating flake.lock (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3827791Z        "err": {
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3828233Z          "cmd": "/bin/sh -c install-tool nix 2.14.1",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3842632Z          "stderr": "terminate called after throwing an instance of 'nix::Error'\n  what():  \u001b[31;1merror:\u001b[0m cannot determine user's home directory\n/usr/local/bin/nix: line 6:   141 Aborted                 (core dumped) /opt/buildpack/tools/nix/2.14/bin/nix \"$@\"\n",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3843237Z          "stdout": "installing v2 tool nix v2.14\nlinking tool nix v2.14\n",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3843542Z          "options": {
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3843841Z            "cwd": "/tmp/renovate/repos/github/budimanjojo/dotfiles",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3844186Z            "encoding": "utf-8",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3844413Z            "env": {
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3844627Z              "HOME": "/home/ubuntu",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3845463Z              "PATH": "/home/ubuntu/.cargo/bin:/home/ubuntu/.local/bin:/go/bin:/home/ubuntu/bin:/home/ubuntu/.npm-global/bin:/home/ubuntu/.cargo/bin:/home/ubuntu/.local/bin:/go/bin:/home/ubuntu/bin:/home/ubuntu/.npm-global/bin:/home/ubuntu/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3846025Z              "LC_ALL": "C.UTF-8",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3846306Z              "LANG": "C.UTF-8",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3846610Z              "BUILDPACK_CACHE_DIR": "/tmp/renovate/cache/containerbase",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3846977Z              "CONTAINERBASE_CACHE_DIR": "/tmp/renovate/cache/containerbase"
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3847257Z            },
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3847482Z            "maxBuffer": 10485760,
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3847715Z            "timeout": 900000
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3847930Z          },
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3848140Z          "exitCode": 134,
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3848358Z          "name": "ExecError",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3849295Z          "message": "Command failed: install-tool nix 2.14.1\nterminate called after throwing an instance of 'nix::Error'\n  what():  \u001b[31;1merror:\u001b[0m cannot determine user's home directory\n/usr/local/bin/nix: line 6:   141 Aborted                 (core dumped) /opt/buildpack/tools/nix/2.14/bin/nix \"$@\"\n",
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3851178Z          "stack": "ExecError: Command failed: install-tool nix 2.14.1\nterminate called after throwing an instance of 'nix::Error'\n  what():  \u001b[31;1merror:\u001b[0m cannot determine user's home directory\n/usr/local/bin/nix: line 6:   141 Aborted                 (core dumped) /opt/buildpack/tools/nix/2.14/bin/nix \"$@\"\n\n    at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (/opt/buildpack/tools/renovate/35.12.0/node_modules/renovate/lib/util/exec/common.ts:99:11)\n    at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:525:35)\n    at ChildProcess.emit (node:domain:489:12)\n    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:291:12)"
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3852033Z        }
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3852782Z DEBUG: No package files need updating (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3853397Z DEBUG: No updated lock files in branch (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3853994Z DEBUG: PR has no releaseTimestamp (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3854560Z DEBUG: No files to commit (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.3855142Z DEBUG: Setting current branch to master (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
2023-03-19T01:41:16.4345244Z DEBUG: latest commit (repository=budimanjojo/dotfiles, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)

Have you created a minimal reproduction repository?

I have read the minimal reproductions documentation and linked to such a repository in the bug description

[viceice]

looks like something on nix side has changed. 🤔 how does nix detect it's home dir?

@JamieMagee can you help?

[viceice]

@rarkins renovate should not pass HOME and PATH ENV on docker mode

[viceice]

@budimanjojo how are you running renovate? (GitHub action, helm chart, docker cli ...) please be as detailed as possible

[budimanjojo]

Sorry, I'm using GHA (mentioned above actually :)). Here's the workflow file: https://github.com/budimanjojo/dotfiles/blob/master/.github/workflows/renovate.yaml
And it only affects lockfile (flake.lock), and the action always returns no error despite this too.

[viceice]

moved the issue, as it's probably the docker user change here

[viceice]

• nix: support running without explicit home containerbase/base#799

[viceice]

• Allow running nix without a /etc/passwd entry NixOS/nix#8074

[JamieMagee]

@viceice thanks for investigating. This appears to be a breaking change in nix 2.14.

[viceice]

should we lock nix to a lower version inside renovate for now?

[viceice]

@budimanjojo You can workaround with renovate constraints¹ option.

{
  "constraints": {
    "nix": "< 2.14.0"
  }
}

Footnotes

1. https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#constraints ↩

[budimanjojo]

Thanks!

[JamieMagee]

should we lock nix to a lower version inside renovate for now?

Yeah, the version of flake.lock hasn't changed in the latest release. So we should be okay to use 2.13.x.