8.12 Invoking guix repl

The guix repl command makes it easier to program Guix in Guile by launching a Guile read-eval-print loop (REPL) for interactive programming (see Using Guile Interactively in GNU Guile Reference Manual), or by running Guile scripts (see Running Guile Scripts in GNU Guile Reference Manual). Compared to just launching the guile command, guix repl guarantees that all the Guix modules and all its dependencies are available in the search path.

The general syntax is:

guix repl options [file args]

When a file argument is provided, file is executed as a Guile scripts:

guix repl my-script.scm

To pass arguments to the script, use -- to prevent them from being interpreted as arguments to guix repl itself:

guix repl -- my-script.scm --input=foo.txt

To make a script executable directly from the shell, using the guix executable that is on the user’s search path, add the following two lines at the top of the script:

#!/usr/bin/env -S guix repl --
!#

Without a file name argument, a Guile REPL is started:

$ guix repl
scheme@(guile-user)> ,use (gnu packages base)
scheme@(guile-user)> coreutils
$1 = #<package coreutils@8.29 gnu/packages/base.scm:327 3e28300>

In addition, guix repl implements a simple machine-readable REPL protocol for use by (guix inferior), a facility to interact with inferiors, separate processes running a potentially different revision of Guix.

The available options are as follows:

--type=type

-t type

Start a REPL of the given TYPE, which can be one of the following:

guile

This is default, and it spawns a standard full-featured Guile REPL.

machine

Spawn a REPL that uses the machine-readable protocol. This is the protocol that the (guix inferior) module speaks.

--listen=endpoint

By default, guix repl reads from standard input and writes to standard output. When this option is passed, it will instead listen for connections on endpoint. Here are examples of valid options:

--listen=tcp:37146

Accept connections on localhost on port 37146.

--listen=unix:/tmp/socket

Accept connections on the Unix-domain socket /tmp/socket.

--load-path=directory

-L directory

Add directory to the front of the package module search path (see Package Modules).

This allows users to define their own packages and make them visible to the script or REPL.

-q

Inhibit loading of the ~/.guile file. By default, that configuration file is loaded when spawning a guile REPL.