My NixOS / Nix dotfiles

This is unused - see nixos-configuration for all my systems.

These are the dotfiles I use on NixOS. Please also see nixos-config. That config is used to bootstrap the whole system while this repo is for my dotfiles and user packages. This includes some custom nix packages and a dotfiles builder based on nix.

Normally the procedure (after cloning and checking out this) is:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.home && home-update

or in fish that would be:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.home; and home-update

Please note that a default.nix is present in your home directory with some configuration. That file in turn tries to load additional files, a default one and host specific one as well as a secrets file which should not be committed.

Emacs

See README.org for emacs configuration - handled through the nix package manager. Emacs configuration is untangled from that org file. Install it like this:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.my-emacs

or if not on NixOS:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.my-emacs

Default packages

So even if above would give me my emacs with the packages and config I want, I prefer installing it through the "meta" package default-packages - like this:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.default-packages

or if not on nixos:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.default-packages

Dotfiles

While some "dotfiles" are clearly installed by just going through the procedure below, most of them are generated and kept up-to-date via nix and the command home-update. The general procedure would be something like:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.dotfiles
$ home-update

Since I have a more comprehensive package called "home" which includes the dotfiles, that is what I install instead of just the dotfiles really.

The above maintains a .dotfiles_version file and a .dotfiles_manifest file in the home directory. These are used for determining whether any update is necessary and what to potentially remove as files might be removed from the nix output. The actual dotfiles are copied rather than linked. It's a somewhat crude solution but works pretty well in practice and as long as home-update is installed (and run pretty much immediately after any changes caused by a nix-env -iA nixos.home) no dependencies should be garbage collected.

Installation

The dotfiles keep a config for the fish shell as I've recently made the switch from zsh.

Git clone something like this:

$ git clone --bare https://github.com/johnae/nixdot.git ~/.cfg
$ cd ~
$ GIT_WORK_TREE=$HOME GIT_DIR=$HOME/.cfg git checkout
$ GIT_WORK_TREE=$HOME GIT_DIR=$HOME/.cfg git config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

If there are any complaints like files already being there, this should help:

$ mkdir -p .cfg-backup && GIT_WORK_TREE=$HOME GIT_DIR=$HOME/.cfg git checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} mv {} .cfg-backup/{}

Above backs up any preexisting files to .cfg-backup. After all this, your home repo can be managed using:

$ home add
$ home pull
$ home push

Etc. It's just git with some special env vars for management. Ofc as mentioned nix is used for generating dotfiles etc so this should mostly just contain the nix expressions and perhaps some helpers.

License

This code is released under the MIT License