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nix home-manager team template

This provides a quick-start template for using home-manager's IaC atop of the nix package manager in a more reproducible way for multiple team members.

Reproducibility across systems is achieved by using pinned nix packages. This team template uses niv to do so.

Why?

home-manager is a great way to manage user-specific configuration ("dotfiles") in a reproducible way. This template takes reproducibility another step by making it so you do not need to install home-manager to use it, and do not need to install home-manager configuration files in a specific place.

Also, since this uses niv to pin nixpkgs and home-manager, you do not need nixpkgs on your path and can be sure the build will be the same on any computer.

Prerequisites

You must have nix installed on your machine.

NB: You do not need to install home-manager itself. It is supplied via a nix shell when running the below scripts.

Setup

  1. Click the "Use this template" or "Code" button on GitHub

  2. Clone your repository onto the computer you want to configure

  3. Initialise pinned dependencies (home-manager and nixpkgs) with the latest version:

    ./dependencies.sh --init

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "niv update" init.nix

NB: this last setup step was crucial on macOS 11.x Big Sur as otherwise shell.nix can load a version of nixpkgs that suffers from clang errors.

Usage

  1. Optionally update dependencies (home-manager and nixpkgs) to the latest version:

    ./dependencies.sh --update

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "niv update" [shell.nix]

  2. Optionally stay informed about home-manager news:

    ./news.sh

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "home-manager news" [shell.nix]

  3. Edit your home configuration to be how you want it.

  4. Run the switch script to switch to your configuration:

    ./switch.sh [-h|--help] [--show-trace] [...]

    which, apart from [-h|--help] which echos script options, is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "home-manager switch [--show-trace] [...]"

  5. List installed packages:

    ./dependencies.sh --list

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "home-manager packages"

Home configuration

This home-manager configuration is intended as a baseline for shared configurations for a team.

See both the home-manager documentation and the following for additional options specific to this configuration.

Defaults

The 'default' configuration provided by this configuration is in home.nix which imports all modules from lib/defaults.

These include:

Required

At a minimum you should configure git with your userName and userEmail.

Example ~/.me.d/git.nix module:

{...}:
{
  programs.git.userEmail = "[email protected]";
  programs.git.userName = "Your Name";
}

Personalisation

All personalised configuration is loaded from all your ~/.me.d/*.nix files. You can split out your personalised configuration in any .nix files you like in that directory or use a monolithic nix file. It's your choice.

NB: to configure multiple personalisation dirs (e.g., a personal one and a corporate one), define the following file:

#~/.me.nix
[
  "~/.me.d"
  "~/.foobar-corp.d"
]

kryptco.kr (ssh integration)

See https://krypt.co

To enable version 2.4.15:

#~/.me.d/utils.nix
{...}:
{
  utils.security.kryptco.kr.enable = true;
}

macOS apps

A list of macOS desktop apps are available to enable in lib/defaults/apps/macOS.

Enabling Apps

An example of enabling or customising one:

#~/.me.d/apps.nix
{...}:
{
  macOS.apps = {
    authy.enable = true;
    docker.enable = true;
    firefox.enable = true;
  };
}

Other customisable options are available for the version and sha256, should you wish to manage the version updates separately.

Spotlight Integration

To ensure the apps installed via nix are seen by spotlight, you can enable the following flag which will by default add aliases for the apps into ~/Applications/Nix.

#~/.me.d/apps.nix
{...}:
{
  ...
  macOS.apps = {
    aliases.enable = true;
  };
}

NB: see nix-community/home-manager#1341 (comment) for further discussion and details.

AWS

Enabling the inclusion of awscli can be done in two ways:

#~/.me.d/aws.nix
{...}:
{
  cloud.aws.enable = true;
}

Which at this time is equivalent to:

#~/.me.d/programs.nix
{pkgs, ...}:
{
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    awscli2
  ];
}

Caveats

Since we do not install home-manager, you need to let home-manager manage your shell, otherwise it will not be able to add its hooks to your profile, e.g. no shell variables will get set by home-manager. Please consult home-manager documentation for exact required steps.

Also since we do not install home-manager, you cannot run the home-manager script from any directory and expect it to work. It must be run from within the nix-shell. (This is actually a feature!)