How to fix terraform and nix flakes

Published on 10/27/2023, 333 words, 2 minutes to read

Recently Terraform changed licenses to the Business Source License. This is a non-free license in the eyes of Nix, so now whenever you update your project flakes, you get greeted by this lovely error:

error: Package ‘terraform-1.6.2’ in /nix/store/z1nvpjx9vd4151vx2krxzmx2p1a36pf9-source/pkgs/applications/networking/cluster/terraform/default.nix:52 has an unfree license (‘bsl11’), refusing to evaluate.

a) To temporarily allow unfree packages, you can use an environment variable
   for a single invocation of the nix tools.

      $ export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1

   Note: For `nix shell`, `nix build`, `nix develop` or any other Nix 2.4+
   (Flake) command, `--impure` must be passed in order to read this
   environment variable.

b) For `nixos-rebuild` you can set
    { nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true; }
   in configuration.nix to override this.

Alternatively you can configure a predicate to allow specific packages:
    {
        nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
            "terraform"
        ];
    }

c) For `nix-env`, `nix-build`, `nix-shell` or any other Nix command you can add
    { allowUnfree = true; }
to ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix.

The extra fun part is that when you're using a flake with a per-project version of nixpkgs, none of those workarounds work. Here's what you have to do instead:

In your flake you'll usually have an import of nixpkgs like this:

let
  pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };
in
  crimes_etc

Or like this:

let
  pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
in
  different_crimes_etc

You'll want to change that to this:

let
  pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; config.allowUnfree = true; };
in
  working_crimes_etc

This allows you to bypass the license check for all packages in nixpkgs so that things Just Work™. If you want to only do this for terraform, you can make a separate instance of nixpkgs to pull out only terraform, but I think that overall it's probably easier to just eliminate the problem entirely.

I hope this helps you out!

<Cadey>

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<Aoi>

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Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: nix, terraform, enshittification