nixos-wsl-starter

This repository is intended to be a sane, batteries-included starter template for running a JeezyVim-powered NixOS development environment on WSL.

If you don't want to dig into NixOS too much right now, the only file you need to concern yourself with is home.nix. This is where you can add and remove binaries to your global $PATH.

Go to https://search.nixos.org to find the correct package names, though usually they will be what you expect them to be in other package managers.

unstable-packages is for packages that you want to always keep at the latest released versions, and stable-packages is for packages that you want to track with the current release of NixOS (currently 24.05).

If you want to update the versions of the available unstable-packages, run nix flake update to pull the latest version of the Nixpkgs repository and then apply the changes.

Make sure to look at all the FIXME notices in the various files which are intended to direct you to places where you may want to make configuration tweaks.

If you found this starter template useful, please consider sponsoring and subscribing to my YouTube channel.

What Is Included

This starter is a lightly-opinionated take on a productive terminal-driven development environment based on my own preferences. However, it is trivial to customize to your liking both by removing and adding tools that you prefer.

The default editor is JeezyVim
win32yank is used to ensure perfect bi-directional copying and pasting to and from Windows GUI applications and LunarVim running in WSL
The default shell is fish
Native docker (ie. Linux, not Windows) is enabled by default
The prompt is Starship
fzf, lsd, zoxide, and broot are integrated into fish by default
- These can all be disabled easily by setting enable = false in home.nix, or just removing the lines all together
direnv is integrated into fish by default
git config is generated in home.nix with options provided to enable private HTTPS clones with secret tokens
fish config is generated in home.nix and includes git aliases, useful WSL aliases

win32yank

There have been some recent changes in WSL2 that make running win32yank within WSL2 very slow. You should install this on Windows by running scoop install win32yank or compiling it from source, and then adding it to your $PATH:

{
    programs.fish = {
      interactiveShellInit = ''
        fish_add_path --append /mnt/c/Users/<Your Windows Username>/scoop/apps/win32yank/0.1.1
      '';
    };
}

Quickstart

Get the latest release
Install it (tweak the command to your desired paths):

wsl --import NixOS .\NixOS\ .\nixos-wsl.tar.gz --version 2

Enter the distro:

wsl -d NixOS

Get a copy of this repo (you'll probably want to fork it eventually):

git clone https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter.git /tmp/configuration
cd /tmp/configuration

Change the username to your desired username in flake.nix with nvim (or whichever editor you prefer)
Install win32yank with scoop and add it to your $PATH in NixOS
Apply the configuration and shutdown the WSL2 VM

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /tmp/configuration && sudo shutdown -h now

Reconnect to the WSL2 VM

wsl -d NixOS

cd ~ and then pwd should now show /home/<YOUR_USERNAME>
Move the configuration to your new home directory

mv /tmp/configuration ~/configuration

Go through all the FIXME: notices in ~/configuration and make changes wherever you want
Apply the configuration

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/configuration

Note: If developing in Rust, you'll still be managing your toolchains and components like rust-analyzer with rustup!

Project Layout

In order to keep the template as approachable as possible for new NixOS users, this project uses a flat layout without any nesting or modularization.

flake.nix is where dependencies are specified
- nixpkgs is the current release of NixOS
- nixpkgs-unstable is the current trunk branch of NixOS (ie. all the latest packages)
- home-manager is used to manage everything related to your home directory (dotfiles etc.)
- nur is the community-maintained Nix User Repositories for packages that may not be available in the NixOS repository
- nixos-wsl exposes important WSL-specific configuration options
- nix-index-database tells you how to install a package when you run a command which requires a binary not in the $PATH
wsl.nix is where the VM is configured
- The hostname is set here
- The default shell is set here
- User groups are set here
- WSL configuration options are set here
- NixOS options are set here
home.nix is where packages, dotfiles, terminal tools, environment variables and aliases are configured