NixOS Config

This is my personal dev setup, managed by NixOS. This exists primarily as a backup and so i can sync things myself between laptops; don't blindly take this and apply it to your system. You've been warned 😇

Trying it out in a virtual machine

On a MacOS host machine, an easy way to do this is with UTM. Note that while we don't need much space, MacOS will refuse to install if you don't give it a big enough HD. 32gb worked for me. Let it download MacOS from Apple and follow the regular process of setting up the machine. I used a user called Demo with an account name demo here, so i ended up with a machine called Demos-Virtual-Machine.

Now open the terminal and install nix:

Last login: Thu Aug 3 10:47:39 on console
demo@Demos-Virtual-Machine ~ % sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

Restart the terminal to enable nix.

We need to clone the git repo, but we don't have git installed. Instead of installing git on the system, we can use nix-shell -p git to get a temporary shell with git installed.

demo@Demos-Virtual-Machine ~ % nix-shell -p git
[nix-shell:~]$ # Yay, we now have git available
[nix-shell:~]$ git --version
git version 2.41.0

Clone this repo:

[nix-shell:~]$ git clone https://github.com/akupila/nixos-config.git
[nix-shell:~]$ cd nixos-config

We don't need the nix shell anymore, so we could also exit out.

The config has the name of the machine, which won't match the VM. Replace Anttis-MBP with Demos-Virtual-Machine in ~/nixos-config/flake.nix and akupila with demo in flake.nix. Now we can bootstrap the new system:

[nix-shell:~/nixos-config]$ nix run nix-darwin --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' -- switch --flake .

This will download a lot of stuff, install it and configure the system according to the configuration in this repo. It'll take a while but it's mostly hands-off, except for entering the sudo password once.

We're done! 🎉

We can now open WezTerm, which provides some nice features and true color support. We now also have git so we don't need to do the nix-shell trick anymore. We can now start Neovim with nvim, which will install its own plugins.

For updates, we can modify the files in ~/nixos-config and apply the changes:

$ darwin-rebuild switch --flake ~/nixos-config

If files are added or renamed, they need to be added the git staging are first (no need to commit): git add ..