9.1 Invoking guix build

The guix build command builds packages or derivations and their dependencies, and prints the resulting store paths. Note that it does not modify the user’s profile—this is the job of the guix package command (see Invoking guix package). Thus, it is mainly useful for distribution developers.

The general syntax is:

guix build options package-or-derivation…

As an example, the following command builds the latest versions of Emacs and of Guile, displays their build logs, and finally displays the resulting directories:

guix build emacs guile

Similarly, the following command builds all the available packages:

guix build --quiet --keep-going \
  $(guix package -A | awk '{ print $1 "@" $2 }')

package-or-derivation may be either the name of a package found in the software distribution such as coreutils or coreutils@8.20, or a derivation such as /gnu/store/…-coreutils-8.19.drv. In the former case, a package with the corresponding name (and optionally version) is searched for among the GNU distribution modules (see Package Modules).

Alternatively, the --expression option may be used to specify a Scheme expression that evaluates to a package; this is useful when disambiguating among several same-named packages or package variants is needed.

There may be zero or more options. The available options are described in the subsections below.