static-toolbox VS nix-portable

https://github.com/Azathothas/static-toolbox

I had to mention 4, because people kept asking us about security concerns.

There is also nix-portable (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), which is basically a drop-in replacement for normal nix that does everything required for no-root operation by itself when needed. Just put the single binary in your PATH and it's ready.

level (/nix/store/)

Yes, for cache hits to happen it has to be this way as far as I remember.

There is a project called nix-portable though that I've seen some HPC users report success with:

https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

Great work Graham and team, I'll be switching to it on OSX.

I wonder if you took a look at some of the modifications done by portable-nix (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), most important ones being:

a) Allowing user to choose the location of the nix folder (for example $HOME/.nix) by using bwrap or proot

you can install it and forget about it. yeah the major downside is that you need to disable selinux unless you use nix portable.

Yeah sadly nix-portable doesn't support macOS because of missing kernel features. They are also thinking about docker fallback though: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable/issues/23 🤔😋

There is this: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable but I agree we need an official solution

Not entirely true, there are many ways in which you can use a custom location and still take advantage of the binary cache. You can do it with chroot, file system namespaces, bind mounts and so on. There's also a nice user friendly tool that does exactly this [1].

[1]: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

This is cool! In a similar vein, it's worth mentioning nix-portable is a thing. Same idea of containerization except it avoids docker. https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable