State

This project is currently in heavy development. As soon as the main functions are working, it will be announced. Until then any Suggestions in form of Issues are veery appreciated, but since the whole code is changing a lot, it won't make sense to make any Pull Request.

There are still problems which have to be solved like what happens when two snippets are incompatible to each other or how to update a snippet which has been modified locally, but I'm sure that future me (us? :) ) will find solutions!

On a side note: nix-snippet is written in oil shell, which is a still very new shell scripting language. It's a language I've been following for a few years now and really want to try out!

TODOs before v1

Idea

Use reusable and easily managable snippets for your Nix Config instead of writing everything by your own!

NixOS solves many problems like declarative builds, reproducibility, etc. But currently missing are "sane" and/or "easy to use" configuration presets for NixOS as a Desktop system. The defaults of NixOS modules are usually very minimal and it should always stay that way. But that means that everybody has to configure NixOS "from ground up", similar to how someone would approach e.g. Arch Linux or Gentoo, etc.

There are a few things which try to make configuration a bit easier, e.g. the nixos-hardware and the NixOS Wiki is very helpful in explaining how to configure things. But even with all this it can still be a hassle to configure everything from scratch. Getting a system as convenient to us as e.g. a Manjaro or Ubuntu Linux takes a lot of time. The very fast pace of NixOS and every now and then breaking changes also require people to stay up to date all the time, which is very time consuming.

Nix-Snippets tries to make this easier to some degree by giving the ability to easily integrate "snippets" developed by other people. The intend is that people can develop snippets together but still customize snippets as they wish. At the same time it will hopefully "standardize" NixOS configurations a bit and promote best practices. Examples for snippets can be e.g. sane laptop standards, preconfigured programs like Vim or Steam up to full configurations of window managers with desktop like experience, etc.

How it works

It's still in development, but once finished the workflow should roughly be:

Run nix-snippet init to setup the folder /etc/nixos/snippets/
Use e.g. nix-snippet apply nvim to create the file /etc/nixos/snippets/nvim.nix and automatically have it imported.
The file /etc/nixos/snippets/SNIPPET.nix can be edited to your wishes
Run nix-snippet update to fetch the newest snippet versions and get a list of snippets currently in use which have been updated by upstream
nix-snippet diff SNIPPET to see what actually changed with the newest snippet version
nix-snippet apply SNIPPET to actually apply changes from upstream if you want to have them
nix-snippet ignore SNIPPET if you don't want to see any future changes from SNIPPET
many commands usable to make sharing snippets easy like nix-snippet upload, etc.
...

Setup

First run nix-shell in this folder to have all required dependencies (it's ugly but it works "tm"). Run the command ./nix-snippet.oil init to initialize the repository. This will add an imports statement in your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix, and a file (+folder) /etc/nixos/snippets/default.nix.

Snippet guide

List all existing Snippets and their status. Initially every snippet will be new:

./nix-snippets.oil list
nvim: new

Future ideas

Meta snippets/bundles (snippets which involve other snippets)
Tooling to initialize and write new snippets