nixpkgs / nix home-manager

I currently use Ubuntu and installed nix alongside. This repository contains my personal ~/.config/nixpkgs folder, for sharing, inspiration and retrieving feedback.

This includes home.nix to maintain home-manager, see: https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.html

Disclaimer

This is my personal setup for my local laptop running Ubuntu. I share this for free so everyone can have a look and inspiration or provide feedback to me.

This is not intended to be used by anyone else just by copy and pasting or cloning.

Installation

Install (clone) into ~/.config/nixpkgs.

Install home-manager see: https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.html Execute home-manager switch

Usage

Add packages to home.nix and run home-manager switch.

Folder structure

The folder overlays contains overlays for nix itself. E.g. alter packages like patching.

The folder home is related to extras for home-manager. It has the following sub folder:

home/files Holds configuration files. home-manager doesn't provide modules for all programs. Those files can be added via xdg.configFile.

home/modules Holds nix modules. Not all programs provide modules out of the box. I add my own here, which I might create PRs for in future.

home/programs Holds home-manager programs. entries. Each file corresponds to a single program. Each file is loaded within home.nix.

home/services Holds home-manager services. entries. Each file corresponds to a single service. Each file is loaded within home.nix.

flakes/ Holds structure with specific flakes. Those should provide libraries and template for development projects.

Update

The following will update the whole system and clean things up:

nix-channel --update \
   && home-manager switch \
   && home-manager expire-generations '-30 days' \
   && nix-env --delete-generations +5 \
   && nix store gc \
   && nix store optimise

This will update the channel (fetch state of nixpkgs). It then will update system. Delete old generations. And run garbage collection.

Manual changes

List of manual needed changes for various reasons.

• .desktop files seem not to be supported by home-manager yet. They need to manually be linked, e.g.:

  cd ~/.local/share/applications && ln -s ~/.nix-profile/share/applications/* .
  

Todos

• Migrate neovim

• Migrate ssh config (I don't really like to expose customer server names and configs to outer world, how to handle?)

• Migrate PGP?

  • Right now I've installed gnupg2, gnupg, gpg on ubuntu

• Migrate firefox (with geckodriver), thunderbird, ungoogled chromium

• Begin migrating local development to execute php. On a per customer project.

  • flake.nix and flake.lock need to be checked into a repo … How to handle that if customer doesn't want the file? Maybe symlinks will work, so I've a dedicated repo with the project flakes and link them into project repos?

• Migrate home manager to use flake for better rollback support if update breaks something.

• Maybe PR upstream: ./home/modules/programs/languagetool.nix.

• Migrate other system configurations like keyboard?!

• Begin migrating further configuration, e.g. php fpm pools and apache config (Again I don't like customer internals in public repo, how to handle?) Does that work? I guess nix (home-manager) shouldn't write outside of user home. Maybe within vm as preparation of switch to nix os?

• Migrate desktop environment (is that possible? I select it within ubuntu login screen, guess it needs to be installed or registered somwhere in ubuntu) i3-wm, i3, i3lock-color

Ideas

• Maybe I can have a private channel which provides more sensitive info like customer related things and is referenced from here? I then can make that repo private but keep this one here public?

Resources

Some resources I found useful (in no particular order):

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRGI9KQ3_HP_OFRG6R-p4iFgMSK1t5BHs

• https://nixos.org/learn.html

• https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.html

• https://nixcloud.io/main/en/