nixpkgs/doc/configuration.xml

<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
         xml:id="chap-packageconfig">

<title>Global configuration</title>

<para>Nix packages can be configured to allow or deny certain options.</para>

<para>To apply the configuration edit
<filename>~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix</filename> and set it like

<programlisting>
{
  allowUnfree = true;
}
</programlisting>

and will allow the Nix package manager to install unfree licensed packages.</para>

<para>The configuration as listed also applies to NixOS under
<option>nixpkgs.config</option> set.</para>

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem>
    <para>Allow installing of packages that are distributed under
    unfree license by setting <programlisting>allowUnfree =
    true;</programlisting> or deny them by setting it to
    <literal>false</literal>.</para>

    <para>Same can be achieved by setting the environment variable:

<programlisting>
$ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1
</programlisting>

    </para>
  </listitem>

  <listitem>
    <para>Whenever unfree packages are not allowed, single packages
    can still be allowed by a predicate function that accepts package
    as an argument and should return a boolean:

<programlisting>
allowUnfreePredicate = (pkg: ...);
</programlisting>

    Example to allow flash player and visual studio code only:

<programlisting>
allowUnfreePredicate = with builtins; (pkg: elem (parseDrvName pkg.name).name [ "flashplayer" "vscode" ]);
</programlisting>

    </para>
  </listitem>

  <listitem>
    <para>Whenever unfree packages are not allowed, packages can still
    be whitelisted by their license:

<programlisting>
whitelistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ amd wtfpl ];
</programlisting>
    </para>
  </listitem>

  <listitem>
    <para>In addition to whitelisting licenses which are denied by the
    <literal>allowUnfree</literal> setting, you can also explicitely
    deny installation of packages which have a certain license:

<programlisting>
blacklistedLicenses = with stdenv.lib.licenses; [ agpl3 gpl3 ];
</programlisting>
    </para>
  </listitem>

</itemizedlist>

<para>A complete list of licenses can be found in the file
<filename>lib/licenses.nix</filename> of the nix package tree.</para>


<!--============================================================-->

<section xml:id="sec-modify-via-packageOverrides"><title>Modify
packages via <literal>packageOverrides</literal></title>

<para>You can define a function called
<varname>packageOverrides</varname> in your local
<filename>~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix</filename> to overide nix packages.  It
must be a function that takes pkgs as an argument and return modified
set of packages.

<programlisting>
{
  packageOverrides = pkgs: rec {
    foo = pkgs.foo.override { ... };
  };
}
</programlisting>

</para>

</section>


</chapter>