126 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
126 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Nix Home Manager"
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date: "2022-09-19T21:49:46+02:00"
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author: "$HUMANOID"
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tags: ["nix", "technology", "linux"]
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description: "Basics of using the Nix Home Manager in a way that makes sense to me and probably just me"
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draft: false
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toc: true
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---
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# The Home Manager
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The Nix Home Manager is a way to work with Nix in a declarative environment to manage your dotfiles and user environment packages.
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This can be used on any system running the Nix packagemanager.
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Personally, I've started to dabble around with it a bit after installing the Nix packagemanager in my Alpine installation.
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Since I've already dabbled with Nix on a few systems through NixOS, I already knew the basics of functionally managing packages (or derivations) with the Nix packagemanager.
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Hence I really quickly got sick of installing packages the imperative way.
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After looking around for a bit, I found some post mentioning that managing packages in a functional environment outside of NixOS is a bit of a hack.
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The post referred to some other sources, one of which used a custom meta package and another referred to the [Home Manager](https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/).
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I had messed around with the Nix Home Manager a tiny bit before, but never _really_ gave it a chance to shine as I didn't really understand it.
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This time around, I decided to look up some tutorials and see how it worked.
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When going through the instructions of either tutorial I used, I quickly came to the realisation why I had never _really_ looked at it.
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Both tutorials took a lot of unnecessary steps according to the author's will and assumed that everyone following their tutorials had the same preferences as them.
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I obviously don't.
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So here's my take on installing the Home Manager outside of NixOS.
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# Actually using Home Manager
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Assuming you're continuing from [my previous article on Nix](/rambles/nix-on-other-distros-packagemanagers), the first step is to go to the Home Manager github page and go to the [page regarding the standalone installtion](https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.html#sec-install-standalone).
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From there, things will be quite self explanatory if you're used to the (bare) basics of NixOS.
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Though instead of using `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` you'll be using `$HOME/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix` by default.
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A basic Home Manager installation will leave you with a `home.nix` file with the following content:
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```nix
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{ config, pkgs, ... }:
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{
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# Home Manager needs a bit of information about you and the
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# paths it should manage.
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home.username = "$USER";
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home.homeDirectory = "/home/$USER";
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# This value determines the Home Manager release that your
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# configuration is compatible with. This helps avoid breakage
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# when a new Home Manager release introduces backwards
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# incompatible changes.
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#
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# You can update Home Manager without changing this value. See
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# the Home Manager release notes for a list of state version
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# changes in each release.
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home.stateVersion = "22.05";
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# Let Home Manager install and manage itself.
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programs.home-manager.enable = true;
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}
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```
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### Installing packages
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To add some packages, you'll need to add them to the `home.packages` array.
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On my Alpine installation I have the following:
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```nix
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...
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home.packages = with pkgs; [
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brave
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vscodium
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];
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...
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```
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Notice the `with pkgs;` section.
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This prevents you from having to add the `pkgs` prefix to every package you want to add.
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I don't think this is the idiomatic way of adding packages to your configuration, but it allows me to be a bit lazier and it hasn't caused any breakages yet.
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### Managing dotfiles and configuration
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Another amazing thing the Home Manager can do is manage your dotfiles.
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And this in turn can be managed with Git.
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More on this later
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For instance, I have it manage my Git config using the git module.
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To do this, I have the something like the following in my `home.nix`:
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```nix
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...
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programs.git = {
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enable = true;
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ignores = [ "*.swp" ]; # I don't need to see that I still have a file open in vim
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signing = {
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key = "<gpg-fingerprint>";
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signByDefault = false; # it would probably be better for security to have this be true, but doing do gets annoying really fast
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};
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userEmail = "<user-email>";
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userName = "<user-name>";
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extraConfig = {
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init = {
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defaultBranch = "main";
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};
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};
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};
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...
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```
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Here's the [list of options](https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.html#opt-programs.git.enable) supported by the git module.
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I _strongly_ recommend digging through the documentation, looking for things that interest you in your current situation and setup.
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### Git integration
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Since all the Home Manager requires is (at least) a single text file to manage your dotfiles and Nix environment packages, it's really easy to keep track of your configuration using Git.
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To that end, I have a bare repository on one of my home servers over at `/srv/git/nix/<nix-configuration>.git`
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As a remote, I have pointed my repo in `$HOME/.config/nixpkgs/` to `<server-name>:/srv/git/nix/<nix-configuration>.git`.
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This works over ssh.
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My `$HOME/.ssh/config` contains the following lines to make the preceding work:
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```ssh
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Host <server-name>
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Hostname <ip-address>
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User git
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Identityfile ~/.ssh/<private-key>
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Port 4242
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IdentitiesOnly yes # this makes using an ssh agent a bit easier when using multiple keys on the same host
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```
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