These are my dotfiles.
Rather than scripts to put things in place and symlink, my prevailing approach now is to use Nix Home Manager to do as much as possible declaratively.
- To learn about the approach, and when (and when not) to use Home Manager, keep reading.
- Dive into how to setup a Host.
- Read Guidance on Configuration Files and the structure used in this repo.
The idea is to use Nix Home Manager to manage as much as possible, as that's the most portable between different Hosts.
Ideally we automate the installation and configuration of as much as we can, and make differents Hosts as similar as possible.
Nix Home Manager:
- takes care of installing user packages/apps as specified in
home.nix. - takes care of dotfile configuration by:
- configuring programs and services directly
- applying configuration from files in this repo (in
/dotfiles) - symlinking configuration from files in this repo (just like the old scripts did, but from one central standardised location) (in
/dotfiles)
With this general approach in mind, the way that you use Nix Home Manager depends on the Host machine's Operating System.
| OS | Home Manager | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| NixOS | NixOS Module | The NixOS Linux distribution, running Home Manager as a NixOS module |
| macOS | nix-darwin Module |
Apple Mac managed by nix-darwin with Home Manager running as a module |
| Other Linux | Standalone | Any Linux distribution, with Home Manager installed and configured by Nix |
In a standalone configuration, Home Manager is used to declaratively manage the Host system's User Environments. Since Nix is installed, it can also be used for Development Environments, but that's outside of the scope of this documentation.
In NixOS and nix-darwin environments, in addition to the above, the Host's system configuration can also be managed declaratively using Nix.
Above we state that we use Home Manager as much as possible. But when is it not possible, or not advisable?
What do we instead in those cases?
A thorough breakdown of options is available here.
Bear in mind that what alternative options are available will depend somewhat on the Host Operating System.
My previous setup which did just use scripts to put stuff in place across windows, linux and macos (to different extents) is still available on the legacy branch.