I immediately got lost trying to setup home-manager, zero-to-nix could use a home-manager setup page

[Lamont Granquist]

Tried to go from the zero-to-nix documentation to installing and using home-manager and haven't had any success with the linked blog post: https://www.bekk.christmas/post/2021/16/dotfiles-with-nix-and-home-manager or this more recent one: https://juliu.is/tidying-your-home-with-nix/

The command nix run . switch at the start gave me this:

No configuration file found. Please create one at ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix

I setup a link from that to pwd/home.nix where I was working and got past that, but then run into various bugs including with an initial home-manager switch:

error: file 'home-manager/home-manager/home-manager.nix' was not found in the Nix search path (add it using $NIX_PATH or -I)

       at «none»:0: (source not available)

That seems to be a fixed bug with nixpkgs, so I'm not sure why I'm hitting it: NixOS/nixpkgs#247252

When I try it as nix run home-manager switch I get something totally different:

error:
       … while evaluating the attribute 'activationPackage'

         at /nix/store/s9hqca29ncnqq73jkigk2c95bnwkn2pj-source/modules/default.nix:54:3:

           53|
           54|   activationPackage = module.config.home.activationPackage;
             |   ^
           55|

       … while evaluating a branch condition

         at /nix/store/j0jlb33bm31w347w43051hbffgh616jr-source/lib/lists.nix:57:9:

           56|       fold' = n:
           57|         if n == len
             |         ^
           58|         then nul

       (stack trace truncated; use '--show-trace' to show the full trace)

       error: The option `programs.sl' does not exist. Definition values:
       - In `/Users/lamont/nix/home.nix':
           {
             enable = true;
           }

Also when trying to follow the nix manual instructions on how to update nix on macos I get this:

% sudo -i sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env --install --attr nixpkgs.nix && launchctl remove org.nixos.nix-daemon && launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.nixos.nix-daemon.plist'
Password:
unpacking channels...
error: attribute 'nixpkgs' in selection path 'nixpkgs.nix' not found

Little bit frustrated today so I'm probably moving on to other things I have to do and will circle around later to see where things stand in a few months, but hopefully I've convinced you that there's a need for a zero-to-nix page on installing home-manager which is always-up-to-date and it doesn't rely on random blog pages which don't use the determinate nix installer.

[Andrew Helwer]

Yeah that linked blog post is both out of date and includes basic syntax errors. It should be removed. The zero-to-nix tutorial is excellent and then it refers you to a blog post that is broken in multiple ways. Bad.