GNU Guix

ID

guix

Home page

https://guix.gnu.org

Platforms

🐧 Linux

Operations

installed · outdated · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · sync · cleanup

purl types

pkg:guix

CLI name

guix

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: guix

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/guix.py

GNU Guix, GNU’s functional package manager.

Note

All operations target the current user’s default profile. Declarative system configuration (Guix System config.scm) is not covered.

Guix is a rolling release with no upstream semver to pin against: guix --version reports a release tag, a git describe string, or the bare commit hash of an in-tree checkout. No requirement floor is enforced, since any working guix will do.

Warning

search evaluates every package definition to match the query, so its cost scales with the size of the package set, not the result count: tens of seconds on a freshly pulled Guix, longer still from an in-tree development checkout. The call is bounded by mpm --timeout (120s by default), past which it is killed with no results returned, so a slow search can look like a hang.

What mpm adds to guix

Through mpm, guix gains --exact and --extended search, to narrow to exact names or match descriptions.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover guix alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your guix commands, in mpm

You already know guix: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…

With guix

With mpm

List what’s installed

guix package --list-installed

mpm --guix installed

List outdated packages

guix upgrade --dry-run

mpm --guix outdated

Search for a package

guix search hello

mpm --guix search hello

Install a package

guix install hello

mpm install pkg:guix/hello

Upgrade one package

guix upgrade hello

mpm --guix upgrade hello

Upgrade everything

guix upgrade

mpm --guix upgrade --all

Remove a package

guix remove hello

mpm remove pkg:guix/hello

Clear caches

guix gc

mpm --guix cleanup --cache

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

orphans

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

doctor

Selecting and configuring guix

Deselect guix for a single run with --no-guix, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
guix = false

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.guix]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template guix prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes

A few jobs you would otherwise script around guix, one mpm command each:

  • Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --guix dump guix.toml, then mpm restore guix.toml on the next one.

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --guix sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of GNU Guix’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

  • Registry: Git-manifest indexes

  • Retraction: Index revert: reverting the manifest, Portfile or derivation commit withdraws the version

  • Publish date: ❌ only the commit date, which is client-set and trivially backdated

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe

The version is probed by running:

$ guix --version
guix (GNU Guix) 1.4.0

and extracted with the first of these regular expressions to match:

r"guix \(GNU Guix\) (?P<version>\d[\w.\-+]*)"
r"guix \(GNU Guix\) (?P<version>[0-9a-f]{7,40})\b"

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know GNU Guix well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ guix package --list-installed
hello	2.10	out	/gnu/store/k74skdjjb9c9zqjv9nmgd6zi92wpf3q0-hello-2.10
python	3.10.7	out	/gnu/store/2n3g8n7d5xkp6h4qz1v8m0rjc9wf5aby-python-3.10.7

$ guix upgrade --dry-run
The following packages would be upgraded:
   hello 2.12.1 → 2.12.3
   sed   4.8 → 4.9

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --guix installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog

  • 6.4.1 (2026-05-04)

    • Drop the >=1.0.0 version requirement and add a hex-hash regex variant, so guix pull installs and dev wrappers reporting a git commit hash register as available.

  • 6.4.0 (2026-04-27)

    • Add GNU Guix package manager with installed, outdated, search, install, upgrade, remove, sync, and cleanup support.