In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights: Support is planned until the end of April 2021, handing over to 21.03. GNOME desktop environment was upgraded to 3.36, see its release notes. maxx package removed along with services.xserver.desktopManager.maxx module. Please migrate to cdesktopenv and services.xserver.desktopManager.cde module. We now distribute a GNOME ISO. PHP now defaults to PHP 7.4, updated from 7.3. Two new options, authorizedKeysCommand and authorizedKeysCommandUser, have been added to the openssh module. If you have AuthorizedKeysCommand in your services.openssh.extraConfig you should make use of these new options instead. There is a new module for Podman(virtualisation.podman), a drop-in replacement for the Docker command line. The new virtualisation.containers module manages configuration shared by the CRI-O and Podman modules. Declarative Docker containers are renamed from docker-containers to virtualisation.oci-containers.containers. This is to make it possible to use podman instead of docker. MariaDB has been updated to 10.4, MariaDB Galera to 26.4. Before you upgrade, it would be best to take a backup of your database. For MariaDB Galera Cluster, see Upgrading from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 with Galera Cluster instead. Before doing the upgrade read Incompatible Changes Between 10.3 and 10.4. After the upgrade you will need to run mysql_upgrade. MariaDB 10.4 introduces a number of changes to the authentication process, intended to make things easier and more intuitive. See Authentication from MariaDB 10.4. unix_socket auth plugin does not use a password, and uses the connecting user's UID instead. When a new MariaDB data directory is initialized, two MariaDB users are created and can be used with new unix_socket auth plugin, as well as traditional mysql_native_password plugin: root@localhost and mysql@localhost. To actually use the traditional mysql_native_password plugin method, one must run the following: services.mysql.initialScript = pkgs.writeText "mariadb-init.sql" '' ALTER USER root@localhost IDENTIFIED VIA mysql_native_password USING PASSWORD("verysecret"); ''; When MariaDB data directory is just upgraded (not initialized), the users are not created or modified.

The following new services were added since the last release: There is a new module that provides doas, a lighter alternative to sudo with many of the same features.

When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes: buildGoModule now internally creates a vendor directory in the source tree for downloaded modules instead of using go's module proxy protocol. This storage format is simpler and therefore less likekly to break with future versions of go. As a result buildGoModule switched from modSha256 to the vendorSha256 attribute to pin fetched version data. buildGoModule still accepts modSha256 with a warning, but support will be removed in the next release. Grafana is now built without support for phantomjs by default. Phantomjs support has been deprecated in Grafana and the phantomjs project is currently unmaintained. It can still be enabled by providing phantomJsSupport = true to the package instanciation: { services.grafana.package = pkgs.grafana.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: rec { phantomJsSupport = false; }); } The supybot module now uses /var/lib/supybot as its default stateDir path if stateVersion is 20.09 or higher. It also enables number of systemd sandboxing options which may possibly interfere with some plugins. If this is the case you can disable the options through attributes in systemd.services.supybot.serviceConfig. The security.duosec.skey option, which stored a secret in the nix store, has been replaced by a new security.duosec.secretKeyFile option for better security. security.duosec.ikey has been renamed to security.duosec.integrationKey. vmware has been removed from the services.x11.videoDrivers defaults. For VMWare guests set virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable to true which will include the appropriate drivers. The initrd SSH support now uses OpenSSH rather than Dropbear to allow the use of Ed25519 keys and other OpenSSH-specific functionality. Host keys must now be in the OpenSSH format, and at least one pre-generated key must be specified. If you used the boot.initrd.network.ssh.host*Key options, you'll get an error explaining how to convert your host keys and migrate to the new boot.initrd.network.ssh.hostKeys option. Otherwise, if you don't have any host keys set, you'll need to generate some; see the hostKeys option documentation for instructions. Since this release there's an easy way to customize your PHP install to get a much smaller base PHP with only wanted extensions enabled. See the following snippet installing a smaller PHP with the extensions imagick, opcache, pdo and pdo_mysql loaded: environment.systemPackages = [ (pkgs.php.withExtensions ({ all, ... }: with all; [ imagick opcache pdo pdo_mysql ]) ) ]; The default php attribute hasn't lost any extensions. The opcache extension has been added. All upstream PHP extensions are available under ]]>. All PHP config flags have been removed for the following reasons: The updated php attribute is now easily customizable to your liking by using php.withExtensions or php.buildEnv instead of writing config files or changing configure flags. The remaining configuration flags can now be set directly on the php attribute. For example, instead of php.override { config.php.embed = true; config.php.apxs2 = false; } you should now write php.override { embedSupport = true; apxs2Support = false; } Gollum received a major update to version 5.x and you may have to change some links in your wiki when migrating from gollum 4.x. More information can be found here. Deluge 2.x was added and is used as default for new NixOS installations where stateVersion is >= 20.09. If you are upgrading from a previous NixOS version, you can set service.deluge.package = pkgs.deluge-2_x to upgrade to Deluge 2.x and migrate the state to the new format. Be aware that backwards state migrations are not supported by Deluge. Add option services.nginx.enableSandbox to starting Nginx web server with additional sandbox/hardening options. By default, write access to services.nginx.stateDir is allowed. To allow writing to other folders, use systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths systemd.services.nginx.serviceConfig.ReadWritePaths = [ "/var/www" ]; The NixOS options nesting.clone and nesting.children have been deleted, and replaced with named configurations. Replace a nesting.clone entry with: { specialisation.example-sub-configuration = { configuration = { ... }; }; Replace a nesting.children entry with: { specialisation.example-sub-configuration = { inheritParentConfig = false; configuration = { ... }; }; To switch to a specialised configuration at runtime you need to run: # sudo /run/current-system/specialisation/example-sub-configuration/bin/switch-to-configuration test Before you would have used: # sudo /run/current-system/fine-tune/child-1/bin/switch-to-configuration test The Nginx log directory has been moved to /var/log/nginx, the cache directory to /var/cache/nginx. The option services.nginx.stateDir has been removed. The httpd web server previously started its main process as root privileged, then ran worker processes as a less privileged identity user. This was changed to start all of httpd as a less privileged user (defined by and ). As a consequence, all files that are needed for httpd to run (included configuration fragments, SSL certificates and keys, etc.) must now be readable by this less privileged user/group. The default value for has been changed from prefork to event. Along with this change the default value for services.httpd.virtualHosts.<name>.http2 has been set to true. The systemd-networkd option systemd.network.networks.<name>.dhcp.CriticalConnection has been removed following upstream systemd's deprecation of the same. It is recommended to use systemd.network.networks.<name>.networkConfig.KeepConfiguration instead. See systemd.network 5 for details. The systemd-networkd option systemd.network.networks._name_.dhcpConfig has been renamed to following upstream systemd's documentation change. See systemd.network 5 for details. In the picom module, several options that accepted floating point numbers encoded as strings (for example ) have been changed to the (relatively) new native float type. To migrate your configuration simply remove the quotes around the numbers. When using buildBazelPackage from Nixpkgs, flat hash mode is now used for dependencies instead of recursive. This is to better allow using hashed mirrors where needed. As a result, these hashes will have changed. The rkt module has been removed, it was archived by upstream. The Bazaar VCS is unmaintained and, as consequence of the Python 2 EOL, the packages bazaar and bazaarTools were removed. Breezy, the backward compatible fork of Bazaar (see the announcement), was packaged as breezy and can be used instead. Regarding Nixpkgs, fetchbzr, nix-prefetch-bzr and Bazaar support in Hydra will continue to work through Breezy. In addition to the hostname, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN), which consists of ${cfg.hostName} and ${cfg.domain} is now added to /etc/hosts, to allow local FQDN resolution, as used by the hostname --fqdn command and other applications that try to determine the FQDN. These new entries take precedence over entries from the DNS which could cause regressions in some very specific setups. Additionally the hostname is now resolved to 127.0.0.2 instead of 127.0.1.1 to be consistent with what nss-myhostname (from systemd) returns. The old behaviour can e.g. be restored by using networking.hosts = lib.mkForce { "127.0.1.1" = [ config.networking.hostName ]; };. The hostname (networking.hostName) must now be a valid DNS label (see RFC 1035) and as such must not contain the domain part. This means that the hostname must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. The maximum length is 63 characters. Additionally it is recommended to only use lower-case characters. The GRUB specific option boot.loader.grub.extraInitrd has been replaced with the generic option boot.initrd.secrets. This option creates a secondary initrd from the specified files, rather than using a manually created initrd file. Due to an existing bug with boot.loader.grub.extraInitrd, it is not possible to directly boot an older generation that used that option. It is still possible to rollback to that generation if the required initrd file has not been deleted.

SD and ISO images are now compressed by default using zstd. services.journald.rateLimitBurst was updated from 1000 to 10000 to follow the new upstream systemd default. The notmuch package move its emacs-related binaries and emacs lisp files to a separate output. They're not part of the default out output anymore - if you relied on the notmuch-emacs-mua binary or the emacs lisp files, access them via the notmuch.emacs output. The default output of buildGoPackage is now $out instead of $bin. The cc- and binutils-wrapper's "infix salt" and _BUILD_ and _TARGET_ user infixes have been replaced with with a "suffix salt" and suffixes and _FOR_BUILD and _FOR_TARGET. This matches the autotools convention for env vars which standard for these things, making interfacing with other tools easier. Additional Git documentation (HTML and text files) is now available via the git-doc package. Default algorithm for ZRAM swap was changed to zstd. The scripted networking system now uses .link files in /etc/systemd/network to configure mac address and link MTU, instead of the sometimes buggy network-link-* units, which have been removed. Bringing the interface up has been moved to the beginning of the network-addresses-* unit. Note this doesn't require systemd-networkd - it's udev that parses .link files. Extra care needs to be taken in the presence of legacy udev rules to rename interfaces, as MAC Address and MTU defined in these options can only match on the original link name. In such cases, you most likely want to create a 10-*.link file through and set both name and MAC Address / MTU there. Grafana received a major update to version 7.x. A plugin is now needed for image rendering support, and plugins must now be signed by default. More information can be found in the Grafana documentation.