Doesn't work on clean machine (error: file 'nixpkgs/lib' was not found in the Nix search path)

[thomasjm]

I'm trying to use this package to build clojupyter on Nix and running into some trouble. Following the instructions, I clone the repo, use lein to generate a pom.xml, and then run mvn2nix with nix run -f https://github.com/fzakaria/mvn2nix/archive/master.tar.gz --command mvn2nix. I get the following error:

error: file 'nixpkgs/lib' was not found in the Nix search path (add it using $NIX_PATH or -I), at /nix/store/f0my6g5a4d353j7h3771baqfn96f1a3v-gitignore-src/default.nix:1:16
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

I made a Docker-based repro which installs Nix on Ubuntu 20.04 and then goes through this process. You can look at the short Dockerfile for details. You can run it like this:

git clone git@github.com:thomasjm/clojupyter.git
cd clojupyter
docker build .

Outside of Docker, I was able to get past this issue by setting NIX_PATH to point to a nixpkgs checkout. But I thought I'd report this as a bug since it doesn't seem to work without that step.