3.7 Channels

Guix and its package collection are updated by running guix pull (see Invoking guix pull). By default guix pull downloads and deploys Guix itself from the official GNU Guix repository. This can be customized by defining channels in the ~/.config/guix/channels.scm file. A channel specifies a URL and branch of a Git repository to be deployed, and guix pull can be instructed to pull from one or more channels. In other words, channels can be used to customize and to extend Guix, as we will see below.

3.7.1 Using a Custom Guix Channel

The channel called guix specifies where Guix itself—its command-line tools as well as its package collection—should be downloaded. For instance, suppose you want to update from your own copy of the Guix repository at example.org, and specifically the super-hacks branch, you can write in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm this specification:

;; Tell 'guix pull' to use my own repo.
(list (channel
        (name 'guix)
        (url "https://example.org/my-guix.git")
        (branch "super-hacks")))

From there on, guix pull will fetch code from the super-hacks branch of the repository at example.org.

3.7.2 Specifying Additional Channels

You can also specify additional channels to pull from. Let’s say you have a bunch of custom package variants or personal packages that you think would make little sense to contribute to the Guix project, but would like to have these packages transparently available to you at the command line. You would first write modules containing those package definitions (see Package Modules), maintain them in a Git repository, and then you and anyone else can use it as an additional channel to get packages from. Neat, no?

Warning: Before you, dear user, shout—“woow this is soooo coool!”—and publish your personal channel to the world, we would like to share a few words of caution:

• Before publishing a channel, please consider contributing your package definitions to Guix proper (see Contributing). Guix as a project is open to free software of all sorts, and packages in Guix proper are readily available to all Guix users and benefit from the project’s quality assurance process.
• When you maintain package definitions outside Guix, we, Guix developers, consider that the compatibility burden is on you. Remember that package modules and package definitions are just Scheme code that uses various programming interfaces (APIs). We want to remain free to change these APIs to keep improving Guix, possibly in ways that break your channel. We never change APIs gratuitously, but we will not commit to freezing APIs either.
• Corollary: if you’re using an external channel and that channel breaks, please report the issue to the channel authors, not to the Guix project.

You’ve been warned! Having said this, we believe external channels are a practical way to exert your freedom to augment Guix’ package collection and to share your improvements, which are basic tenets of free software. Please email us at guix-devel@gnu.org if you’d like to discuss this.

Once you have a Git repository containing your own package modules, you can write ~/.config/guix/channels.scm to instruct guix pull to pull from your personal channel in addition to the default Guix channel(s):

;; Add my personal packages to those Guix provides.
(cons (channel
        (name 'my-personal-packages)
        (url "https://example.org/personal-packages.git"))
      %default-channels)

Note that the snippet above is (as always!) Scheme code; we use cons to add a channel the list of channels that the variable %default-channels is bound to (see cons and lists in GNU Guile Reference Manual). With this file in place, guix pull builds not only Guix but also the package modules from your own repository. The result in ~/.config/guix/current is the union of Guix with your own package modules:

$ guix pull --list-generations
…
Generation 19	Aug 27 2018 16:20:48
  guix d894ab8
    repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
    branch: master
    commit: d894ab8e9bfabcefa6c49d9ba2e834dd5a73a300
  my-personal-packages dd3df5e
    repository URL: https://example.org/personal-packages.git
    branch: master
    commit: dd3df5e2c8818760a8fc0bd699e55d3b69fef2bb
  11 new packages: my-gimp, my-emacs-with-cool-features, …
  4 packages upgraded: emacs-racket-mode@0.0.2-2.1b78827, …

The output of guix pull above shows that Generation 19 includes both Guix and packages from the my-personal-packages channel. Among the new and upgraded packages that are listed, some like my-gimp and my-emacs-with-cool-features might come from my-personal-packages, while others come from the Guix default channel.

3.7.3 Replicating Guix

The guix pull --list-generations output above shows precisely which commits were used to build this instance of Guix. We can thus replicate it, say, on another machine, by providing a channel specification in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm that is “pinned” to these commits:

;; Deploy specific commits of my channels of interest.
(list (channel
       (name 'guix)
       (url "https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git")
       (commit "d894ab8e9bfabcefa6c49d9ba2e834dd5a73a300"))
      (channel
       (name 'my-personal-packages)
       (url "https://example.org/personal-packages.git")
       (branch "dd3df5e2c8818760a8fc0bd699e55d3b69fef2bb")))

The guix describe --format=channels command can even generate this list of channels directly (see Invoking guix describe).

At this point the two machines run the exact same Guix, with access to the exact same packages. The output of guix build gimp on one machine will be exactly the same, bit for bit, as the output of the same command on the other machine. It also means both machines have access to all the source code of Guix and, transitively, to all the source code of every package it defines.

This gives you super powers, allowing you to track the provenance of binary artifacts with very fine grain, and to reproduce software environments at will—some sort of “meta reproducibility” capabilities, if you will. See Inferiors, for another way to take advantage of these super powers.