guix-atomese

A Guix channel providing packages for the OpenCog Atomese ecosystem.

There are three reasons to try guix:

• To provide a local shell that has all Atomese components installed, so that new users can just "use it" without getting tangled up with install issues;
• As a replacement for docker, allowing OpenCog Atomese to be deployed in a localized container;
• As a way of getting OpenCog packages installed on arbitrary distros. OpenCog is not packaged in either Debian or Fedora, never mind any smaller distros.

These three different ways of automating the use of OpenCog are loosely documented below.

(Experimental. This is brand new, as of December 2025. We'll have to see how things go.)

Overview

There are several steps:

• Install guix.
• Configure the Atomese channel.
• Guix pull
• Build the Atomese packages.
• A choice of: -- Using Atomese in a local shell. -- Installing all packages into the base OS filesystem. -- Running a container with all of the OpenCog Atomese components in it.

These steps are documented below.

Install Guix

The official installer works fine:

  cd /tmp
  wget https://guix.gnu.org/install.sh
  chmod +x install.sh
  sudo ./install.sh

Be sure to say yes to the question about ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile as otherwise, you'll end up doing it manually, anyway. Its basically just this:

  source ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile

Adding This Channel

Add this channel to your ~/.config/guix/channels.scm:

(cons* (channel
        (name 'atomese)
        (url "https://github.com/opencog/guix-atomese")
        (branch "master"))
       %default-channels)

Guix pull

The guix pull command syncs up with the latest guix packages. It is similar to apt get upgrade or yum upgrade. It will tak an hour if this is the first time that you run it; it will be faster on subsequent tries. But still slow -- maybe 3 to 10 minutes, because it tries to recompute a lot of hashes each go-around. So don't do this unless you have to.

guix pull

Build the Atomese packages

Build the various Atomese packages:

guix build cogutil
guix build atomspace
guix build sensory
guix build atomspace-storage
guix build atomspace-rocks
guix build cogserver
guix build atomspace-cog
guix build link-grammar
guix build lg-atomese
guix build link-grammar-atomspace

The last package, link-grammar-atomspace depends on (almost) all of the ones that come before it, and thus buiding that one package will automatically cause all the others to built. The sensory package is built separately.

(Note there is a "circular" depedency, here: lg-atomese depends on link-grammar, but link-grammar-atomspace depends on lg-atomese. Thus, two builds.)

Running a shell

To use OpenCog on a temporary basis, within an isolated shell, just say guix shell atomspace -- they will give you a shell with guile, python3 and the AtomSpace in it. So, for example:

guix shell link-grammar-atomspace
$ guile
> (use-modules (opencog))
> (Concept "foo")
> ^D
$ python3
>>> from opencog.atomspace import *
>>> Concept("bar")
^D

The above shell has opencog, but is missing development tools such as cmake. To get those, try this:

guix shell --development

Running in a container

Not yet. Still borken.

guix shell --container cogutil

Installing Packages

I have not tried this yet.

Install packages with:

# Install individual packages
guix install cogutil
guix install atomspace

Or use a manifest (The menifest is currently broken.)

guix package -m manifests/base.scm

Several pre-defined manifests are available (or planned):

• manifests/base.scm - cogutil + atomspace only
• manifests/storage.scm - adds disk and network storage
• manifests/sensory.scm - adds sensori-motor interfaces

Use a manifest to create a development environment:

Repo Overview

This repository defines Guix packages for:

• cogutil - OpenCog base utilities
• atomspace - AtomSpace hypergraph database
• atomspace-storage - generic StorageNode and ProxyNode interfaces
• atomspace-rocks - RocksStorageNode for RocksDB disk AtomSpaces
• atomspace-cog - CogStorageNode for network-distributed AtomSpaces
• cogserver - CogServerNode network server
• link-grammar - Link Grammar parser
• lg-atomese - Atomese bindings for Link Grammar
• sensory - (Experimental) Sensorimotor interfaces
• Maybe more, if/when things settle down ...

Maintenance Workflow

Notes for maintainers. Assumes you have this git repo cloned.

Updating a Package

For each project:

cd /tmp
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/opencog/whatever /tmp/whatever
guix hash -rx /tmp/whatever

THE DIRECTORY MUST BE CLEAN! guix hash -rx . hashes everything, including random junk files, the build dir, and everything else.

Next, edit guix-atomese/packages/whatever.scm update the sha256 hash with above, and the commit with the git commit ID.

Building

To build packages:

cd /path/to/guix-atomese
guix build -L . -e '(@ (guix-atomese packages cogutil) cogutil)'
guix build -L . -e '(@ (guix-atomese packages atomspace) atomspace)'

Force unconditional rebuild by saying:

guix build --no-grafts --check -L modules  -e '(@ (guix-atomese cogutil) cogutil)'

License

AGPL-3.0 with OpenCog linking exception. See LICENSE file.