Deprecated: See lambdadog/nix-profile-declarative for the continuation of my work here. Some of the interesting techniques used in nix-profile-declarative are present on a much more basic level in this repo however, so it may still be useful to read through some of my code here, especially my user-environment implementation.

`nix-extra`

My personal nix helpers. Also a NUR repository.

See my nix-config repository for my personal usage.

Usage

Can be accessed at nur.repos.lambdadog in the NUR, or used as an overlay with something along the lines of:

import <nixpkgs> {
  overlays = [
    ((import <nixpkgs> {}).callPackage (fetchTarball {
      url = "https://github.com/lambdadog/nix-extra/archive/master.tar.gz";
    }) {}).overlay
  ];
}

Note that since we're pulling from master and not using an integrity hash (like sha256), this breaks reproducibility and every build longer than an hour separated (by default, can be configured with tarball-ttl) will fetch the tarball anew. I personally recommend you grab a specific revision of nix-extra to avoid these issues.

Utilities

`pkgs.userEnv`

A trivial-style builder that takes a list of packages and builds a derivation containing the script install-user-environment which will switch the current user to a user environment containing only those packages.

The basic building block for declarative user-env management without taking things quite as far as home-manager.

Usage:

userEnv {
  # Disallows using nix-env imperatively
  static = true;

  packages = [
    hello
  ];
}

$ result/bin/install-user-environment

`pkgs.emacsWithConfig`

A wrapper for emacsWithPackages that uses the -Q and --load flags to load a config without looking at ~/.emacs.d.

Introduces some jank. Notably, ruins emacs start profiling.

Usage:

emacsWithConfig {
  packages = ep: with ep; [ magit ];
  config = ''
    (require 'magit)
  '';
}

Instead of a string, emacsWithConfig can also take a filepath or a derivation. If the path or derivation isn't a single file, emacsWithConfig assumes that init.el exists in the root of it with no error checking, so user be warned.

Notes/Tips:

To access other files in your configuration directory, you may want to call
```
(setq config-home (if load-file-name
                      (file-name-directory load-file-name)
                    default-directory))
```
in your init.el to get the root of your config derivation if you don't pass it some other way.
When passing a path to a nix derivation, the path is copied into the nix store before being used, so your config will be read-only.
On MacOS, Emacs.app never inherits information from your shell env. The sourceFiles argument is an optional argument to emacsWithPackages that allows you to list (bash-compatible) files to source so Emacs is able to inherit your shell enviroment. This is arguably an unrelated hack, but works and I couldn't find anywhere else to put it.