Cannot follow Nix tutorial

When you try to run the nix.dev tutorial, you may find that the nix-shell -p cowsay lolcat command doesn’t work as expected. There are a few potential reasons for why this happens:

Nix is unable to find nixpkgs. Fix this by installing a channel:

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
nix-channel --update

The shell cannot find cowsay or lolcat. This may be because you have a .bashrc or .bash_profile script which modifies the PATH in some way that prevents nix from modifying it as expected. You also might have a line that launches another shell, like exec fish which causes this problem.

History