Bump.
What's the status on merging this? The documentation for multi-user Nix in the Nix manual does not work for me.

+1

The problem with this PR is that 1) installing system services is highly distribution-specific; 2) init.d is old-school, the world (even Debian!) is moving to systemd; 3) there are no tests so it will likely suffer from bitrot in the future.

(Note that the RPM spec in nix.spec.in uses a systemd unit.)

The documentation changes can be merged though.

Also, it adds nix-profile-multiuser.sh and nix-daemon.sh, but doesn't mention them in the manual.

nix-profile-multiuser.sh is the alternative profile.d script (replacing nix.sh) allowing someone to use multi-user settings. The latter script (nix-daemon.sh) is the old fashioned init.d script, but we can also consider not to include it since it's distribution specific (or perhaps use it as an example somewhere).

@edolstra What do you think about the alternative profile.d script for multi user installations? Should we make this optionally configurable somehow and keep the single user variant the default?

I was thinking to put this alternative script in the share/ folder of the Nix installation and to explain users in the manual how to replace the single user profile.d script with the multi-user variant + some additional instructions describing the remaining steps to make it work.

For testing this I'm not yet sure how to do this. I think I have to check how the testsuite is implemented first.

Is this thread dead? Running into issues with the manual and multi-user on CentOS 7. nix-daemon not found.

I've succeeded today in installing multi-user Nix on CentOS 7 via rpmbuild. Bundled nix.sh is completely useless -- I've essentially needed to copy @svanderburg 's script verbatim from his article to get it working. Maybe we want to replace it?

For reference, here's the resulting script: https://gist.github.com/abbradar/8603326a3dbe66ab09baaa213904b176

@abbradar yes, let's update the manual. Can you do a PR?

Sure, I'll look at it later. Just in case -- @svanderburg, are you okay with me making a PR with (basically) your profile script? Maybe you want to work on this by yourself?

Another comment for myself to fix later -- RPM script creates nix-builder-* users when we expect nixbld* by default. It's better to fix it to conform than change the setting, I think.

I've finally got motivation to work on this: see #1141

@abbradar you may be interested in the instructions I've written here: https://gist.github.com/expipiplus1/e571ce88c608a1e83547c918591b149f

@expipiplus1 #1141 does seemingly just that, so good to hear that's a well-known way! Can you try if it works for you if you use Debian/Red Hat derivatives?

@abbradar I've already got a multi user nix setup going here, but next time I need to set one up I'll give your work a try!

Closing this since the installer has multi-user support now. We don't have a sysvinit script, but probably not too many people care about that nowadays...