My NixOS and home-manager config + dotfiles

Note

The general structure of this configuration is based on Misterio77/nix-starter-configs.

Setup guide

If you plan on setting this up on macOS or another non-NixOS Linux distribution, you can skip ahead here.

Installing NixOS (optional)

Install NixOS on a new host by following the installation instructions in the NixOS manual. After successfully installing NixOS, proceed to the next section.

Setting up the system and home

Clone this repository (preferrably, under $HOME/my-nix-config). After that, from within the root folder of the repository, you can:

If you are on NixOS and want to configure it:

First, locate the hardware-configuration.nix that was generated during the installation under /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix, and copy it into the nixos folder of this repository. Rename it as desired, it will be referenced within the configuration.nix that you create for your current system.

After that, create a new host in the nixosConfigurations attribute in flake.nix. This host will be used from now on as an entrypoint to rebuild your current system with the specified configuration files.

Finally, you can run the following command to rebuild NixOS from the config specified for your host in flake.nix:

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ".#<host>"

If you want to build the home with home-manager:

First, create a new user@host in the homeConfigurations attribute in flake.nix. This user@host will be used from now on as an entrypoint to rebuild your current home with the specified home-manager configuration files.

After that, you can build the home configuration with the following command:

home-manager switch --flake ".#<user>@<host>"

Enabling dotfiles for iTerm2 on macOS

If you are on macOS and want to use iTerm2, you will need to configure it to get the configuration from the dotfiles. To do that, enable the "Load settings from a custom folder or URL" checkbox, introduce the path to the iTerm2 dotfiles folder in there, and select "Save changes > Automatically" (if you want to save any changes you do in the configuration).

Interacting with attributes from the REPL

To play around with the flake and the attribute sets, you can open a REPL by running the following command from within the repository root folder:

nix repl --expr "builtins.getFlake \"$PWD\""

Then, load the attributes provided by nixpkgs:

:l <nixpkgs>

Finally, you can import any of the modules by passing it the necessary arguments:

common = import ./home-manager/common.nix {inherit config outputs; pkgs = homeConfigurations."david@yorha".pkgs;}

Common issues

error: path '/nix/store/<hash>-source/<some file>.nix' does not exist

This can happen if you have created a new file and tried to perform a nixos-rebuild or home-manager command without first staging that file in Git. Always remember to stage files before rebuilding!