Nix Config

This is a simple nix flake for managing my dotfiles with home-manager.

I like your funny words, magic man

Not sure what this all means?

Take a look at the learn hub on the NixOS website (scroll down to guides, the manuals, and the other awesome learning resources).

Learning the basics of what Nix (the package manager) is, how the Nix language works, and a bit of NixOS basics should get you up and running. Don't worry if it seems a little confusing at first. Get confortable with the basic concepts and come back here to get your feet wet, it's the best way to learn!

Bootstrapping

To get everything up and running, you need flake-enabled nix and home-manager.

First off, check your nix version using nix --version.

Version < 2.4

Bummer, your nix version does not support flakes. But fear not!

You don't need to mess around with channels to get up and running.

Just run:

nix-shell

Wow, that was easy. Our shell.nix file will detect you can't evaluate (nor lock) the flake, and will grab nix and home-manager from the latest nixos-unstable versions, just for you.

Version >= 2.4

Congrats, your nix version supports flakes! It's just hidden behind a feature flag.

You can bootstrap with:

nix --experimental-features develop "nix-command flakes" .#bridge

The shell will also enable those experimental features, so no need to pass that argument while you're inside (or after installation, if you set the option that enables them globally).

This should generate a flake.lock. Remember to commit it, as this will make future bootstraps reproductible.

Usage

• Run home-manager switch --flake .#bridge to apply your home configuration.
• This is aliased to the reload command.

And that's it, really! You're ready to have fun with your configurations using the latest and greatest nix3 flake-enabled command UX.

What next?

User password and secrets

You have basically two ways of setting up default passwords:

• By default, you'll be prompted for a root password when installing with nixos-install. After you reboot, be sure to add a password to your own account and lock root using sudo passwd -l root.
• Alternatively, you can specify initialPassword for your user. This will give your account a default password, be sure to change it after rebooting! If you do, you should pass --no-root-passwd to nixos-install, to skip setting a password on the root account.

If you don't want to set your password imperatively, you can also use passwordFile for safely and declaratively setting a password from a file outside the nix store.

There's also more advanced options for secret management, including some that can include them (encrypted) into your config repo and/or nix store, be sure to check them out if you're interested.

Dotfile management with home-manager

Besides just adding packages to your environment, home-manager can also manage your dotfiles. I strongly recommend you do, it's awesome!

For full nix goodness, check out the home-manager options with man home-configuration.nix. Using them, you'll be able to fully configure any program with nix syntax and its powerful abstractions.

Alternatively, if you're still not ready to rewrite all your configs to nix syntax, there's home-manager options (such as xdg.configFile) for including files from your config repository into your usual dot directories. Add your existing dotfiles to this repo and try it out!

Adding custom packages

Something you want to use that's not in nixpkgs yet? You can easily build and iterate on a derivation (package) from this very repository.

Create a folder with the desired name inside pkgs, and add a default.nix file containing a derivation. Be sure to also callPackage them on pkgs/default.nix.

You'll be able to refer to that package from anywhere on your home-manager/nixos configurations, build them with nix build .#package-name, or bring them into your shell with nix shell .#package-name.

See the manual for some tips on how to package stuff.

Adding overlays

Found some outdated package on nixpkgs you need the latest version of? Perhaps you want to apply a patch to fix a behaviour you don't like? Nix makes it easy and manageble with overlays!

Use the overlay/default.nix file for this.

If you're creating patches, you can keep them on the overlay folder as well.

See the wiki article to see how it all works.

Adding more hosts or users

You can organize them by hostname and username on nixos and home-manager directories, be sure to also add them to flake.nix.

NixOS makes it easy to share common configuration between hosts (you might want to create a common directory for these), while keeping everything in sync. home-manager can help you sync your environment (from editor to WM and everything in between) anywhere you use it. Have fun!