doc: Write an index of environment variables used in testsuite

This was originally going to be just the testsuite but I kinda just
documented all of them.

I am tired of us not documenting these. This is a starting point to
producing an actually good index. I would like to enforce it in a
pre-commit hook eventually that we document all environment variables
used in Lix itself, even if it is terse dev facing docs.

This is full of a bunch of TODOs caused by auditing code. They should
probably be done at some point.

Change-Id: I7c0d3b257e19bae23d47d1efbd7361d203bccb0e
This commit is contained in:
Jade Lovelace 2024-06-10 21:31:30 -07:00
parent 211f79d4a2
commit 59b5965bbf

View file

@ -330,3 +330,135 @@ solved this need?
~~>
-->
## Magic environment variables
FIXME: maybe this section should be moved elsewhere or turned partially into user docs, but I just need a complete index for now.
I actually want to ban people calling getenv without writing documentation, and produce a comprehensive list of env-vars used by Lix and enforce it.
This is a non-exhaustive list of almost all environment variables, magic or not, accepted or used by various parts of the test suite as well as Lix itself.
Please add more if you find them.
I looked for these in the testsuite with the following bad regexes:
```
rg '(?:[^A-Za-z]|^)(_[A-Z][^-\[ }/:");$(]+)' -r '$1' --no-filename --only-matching tests | sort -u > vars.txt
rg '\$\{?([A-Z][^-\[ }/:");]+)' -r '$1' --no-filename --only-matching tests | sort -u > vars.txt
```
I grepped `src/` for `get[eE]nv\("` to find the mentions in Lix code.
### Used by Lix testing support code
- `_NIX_TEST_ACCEPT` (optional) - Writes out the result of a characterization test as the new expected value.
**Expected value**: 1
- `_NIX_TEST_UNIT_DATA` - The path to the directory for the data for a given unit test suite.
**Expected value**: `tests/unit/libstore/data/libstore` or similar
### Used by Lix
- `_NIX_FORCE_HTTP` - Forces file URIs to be treated as remote ones.
Used by `src/libfetchers/git.cc`, `src/libstore/http-binary-cache-store.cc`,
`src/libstore/local-binary-cache-store.cc`. Seems to be for forcing Git
clones of `git+file://` URLs, making the HTTP binary
cache store accept `file://` URLs (presumably passing them to curl?), and
unknown reasons for the local binary cache.
FIXME(jade): is this obscuring a bug in https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/200?
**Expected value**: 1
- `NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE`, `NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE` (output) - Set by Lix builders; see
`structuredAttrs` documentation.
- `NIX_BIN_DIR`, `NIX_STORE_DIR` (or its inconsistently-used old alias `NIX_STORE`), `NIX_DATA_DIR`,
`NIX_LOG_DIR`, `NIX_LOG_DIR`, `NIX_STATE_DIR`, `NIX_CONF_DIR` -
Overrides compile-time configuration of various locations used by Lix. See `src/libstore/globals.cc`.
**Expected value**: a directory
- `NIX_DAEMON_SOCKET_PATH` (optional) - Overrides the daemon socket path from `$NIX_STATE_DIR/daemon-socket/socket`.
**Expected value**: path to a socket
- `NIX_LOG_FD` (output) - An FD number for logs in `internal-json` format to be sent to.
Used for, mostly, "setPhase" in nixpkgs setup.sh, but can also be creatively used to print verbose log messages from derivations.
**Provided value**: number corresponding to an FD in the builder
- `NIX_PATH` - Search path for `<whatever>`. Documented elsewhere in the manual.
**Expected value**: `:` separated list of things that are not necessarily pointing to filesystem paths
- `NIX_REMOTE` - The default value of the Lix setting `store`.
**Expected value**: "daemon", usually. Could be "auto" or any other value acceptable in `store`.
- `NIX_BUILD_SHELL` - Documented elsewhere; the shell to invoke with `nix-shell` but not `nix develop`/`nix shell`.
The latter ignoring it altogether seems like a bug.
**Expected value**: the path to an executable shell
- `PRINT_PATH` - Undocumented. Used by `nix-prefetch-url` as an alternative form of `--print-path`. Why???
- `_NIX_IN_TEST` - If present with any value, makes `fetchClosure` accept file URLs in addition to HTTP ones. Why is this not `_NIX_FORCE_HTTP`??
Not used anywhere else.
- `NIX_ALLOW_EVAL` - Used by eval-cache tests to block evaluation if set to `0`.
**Expected value**: 1 or 0
- `EDITOR` - Used by `editorFor()`, which has some extremely sketchy editor-detection code for jumping to line numbers.
- `LISTEN_FDS` and `LISTEN_PID` - Used for systemd socket activation using the systemd socket activation protocol.
- `NIX_PAGER` (alternatively, `PAGER`) - Used to select a pager for Lix output. Why does this not use libutil `getEnv()`?
- `LESS` (output) - Sets the pager settings for `less` when invoked by Lix.
- `NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE` - When set, Lix allows the store to be a symlink. Why do we support this?
Apparently [someone was using it enough to fix it](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4038).
- `NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE` (alternatively, `SSL_CERT_FILE`) - Used to set CA certificates for libcurl.
**Expected value**: "/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt" or similar
- `NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS` - Used to set `builders`. Can we please deprecate this?
- `NIX_USER_CONF_FILES` - `:` separated list of config files to load before
`/nix/nix.conf` under each of `XDG_CONFIG_DIRS`.
- `NIX_CONFIG` - Newline separated configuration to load into Lix.
- `NIX_GET_COMPLETIONS` - Returns completions.
Unsure of the exact format, someone should document it; either way my shell never had any completions.
**Expected value**: number of completions to return.
- `IN_SYSTEMD` - Used to switch the logging format so that systemd gets the correct log levels. I think.
- `NIX_HELD_LOCKS` - Not used, what is this for?? We should surely remove it right after searching github?
- `GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE` - Used to set the initial heap size, processed by boehmgc.
- `NIX_COUNT_CALLS` - Documented elsewhere; prints call counts for profiling purposes.
- `NIX_SHOW_STATS` - Documented elsewhere; prints various evaluation statistics like function calls, gc info, and similar.
- `NIX_SHOW_STATS_PATH` - Writes those statistics into a file at the given path instead of stdout. Undocumented.
- `NIX_SHOW_SYMBOLS` - Dumps the symbol table into the show-stats json output.
- `TERM` - If `dumb` or unset, disables ANSI colour output.
- `NO_COLOR`, `NOCOLOR` - Disables ANSI colour output.
- `_NIX_DEVELOPER_SHOW_UNKNOWN_LOCATIONS` - Highlights unknown locations in errors.
- `NIX_PROFILE` - Selects which profile `nix-env` will operate on. Documented elsewhere.
- `NIX_SSHOPTS` - Options passed to `ssh(1)` when using a ssh remote store.
Incorrectly documented on `nix-copy-closure` which is *surely* not the only place they are used??
- `_NIX_TEST_NO_LSOF` - Used on non-Linux, non-macOS platforms to disable using `lsof` when finding gc roots.
Since https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/156 was fixed, this should probably just be removed as it was a bad workaround for a macOS issue.
- `_NIX_TEST_GC_SYNC_1` - Path to a pipe that is used to block the GC briefly to validate invariants from the test suite.
- `_NIX_TEST_GC_SYNC_2` - Path to a pipe that is used to block the GC briefly to validate invariants from the test suite.
- `_NIX_TEST_FREE_SPACE_FILE` - Path to a file containing a decimal number with the free space that the GC is to believe it has.
- Various XDG vars
- `NIX_DEBUG_SQLITE_TRACES` - Dump all sqlite queries to the log at `notice` level.
- `_NIX_TEST_NO_SANDBOX` - Disables actually setting up the sandbox on macOS while leaving other logic the same. Unused on other platforms.
- `_NIX_TRACE_BUILT_OUTPUTS` - Dumps all the derivation paths alongside their outputs as lines into a file of the given name.
### Used by the functional test framework
- `NIX_DAEMON_PACKAGE` - Runs the test suite against an alternate Nix daemon with the current client.
**Expected value**: something like `/nix/store/...-nix-2.18.2`
- `NIX_CLIENT_PACKAGE` - Runs the test suite against an alternate Nix client with the current daemon.
**Expected value**: something like `/nix/store/...-nix-2.18.2`
- `NIX_TESTS_CA_BY_DEFAULT` - Pass `__contentAddressed`, `outputHashMode` and `outputHashAlgo` to builds of some input-addressed derivations in the test suite.
**Expected value**: 1
- `TEST_DATA` - Not an environment variable! This is used in repl characterization tests to refer to `tests/functional/repl_characterization/data`.
More specifically, that path is replaced with the string `$TEST_DATA` in output for reproducibility.
- `TEST_HOME` (output) - Set to the temporary directory that is set as `$HOME` inside the tests, underneath `$TEST_ROOT`.
- `TEST_ROOT` (output) - Set to the temporary directory that is created for each test to mess with.
- `_NIX_TEST_DAEMON_PID` (output) - Used to track the daemon pid to be able to kill it.
**Provided value**: Daemon pid as a base-10 integer, e.g. 2345