I'm moving away from classic dotfiles towards a NixOS and Home Manager configuration. This is the result of that work, thus far anyway. I mention home manager only because this is where I intend that config to live, however at present it is stored privately as I am yet to separate out some more sensitive information.
In short, you probably shouldn't… At least not by simply cloning and applying as this is MY configuration. I'm quite sure it won't be yours, but don't let that stop you taking inspiration from it.
Being a developer by trade, I have generally hand-crafted all of this config, but being a developer the story of this config goes something like this:
- Discover NixOS and marvel at how awesome its power is. I was fortunate to
make this discovery after the introduction of a graphical installer, so I got
a fairly easy start on my laptop and evolved my
configuration.nixfrom there. - Discover home manager and realise its potential to revolutionise how I manage
my dotfiles. This revelation cannot be understated as I was never happy with
any of the existing methods of sharing my dotfiles across hosts.
Incidentally, prior to this the best solution I had found was a tool called
chezmoi. It allowed templated dotfiles, which was pretty awesome, however the syntax baffled many editors, making it tricky to work with. - Find the drawbacks of channels after trying to use parts of my configuration across hosts, only to discover this problem had already been solved by Flakes. Wonder why flakes are not the default approach (there's some history there I gather) but marvel at how powerful and precise their approach is.
- Realise how unwieldy my
home.nixfile is getting and start breaking it into pieces. This was relatively easy in practice. - Realise how unwieldy my
configuration.nixfile is getting and wonder not only how to break this into pieces, but how to enable re-use of portions of it across hosts. This did not appear quite so easy in practice. - Spend far too many hours watching YouTube videos on Nix, reading blog posts about Nix configurations and flakes, and study a (far too) large list of repositories containing mixtures of personal NixOS and home manager configurations that others kindly made public.
- Keep putting off the task of breaking up
configuration.nixbecause it looks so daunting and instead delude oneself into thinking that things are working fine as they are. 😉 - Finally start refactoring, taking inspiration from two of the most impressive and thorough repos I had found.
- Get a Nix error I couldn't decipher, but I'd changed too much at once and couldn't unpick it. Realise I'd made the schoolboy error of copy/pasting a large amount of code I didn't fully understand.
- Abandon that refactor and start again, this time taking a module-based approach I'd come up with which would allow me to gradually migrate my configuration into a new structure.
- Catch myself making things too complicated my creating custom options for
pretty much everything. Fortunately I caught this early and came up with a
rule-of-thumb - if a custom option affected literally one NixOS/home
manager option then it has no reason to exist and the target option should
be used directly instead. This led to an approach with my host config that
I've not seen elsewhere. I have modularised a lot of commonality, creating
options so I could switch certain pieces on or off wholesale. This is not an
uncommon approach, however at a host level I configure my custom options in
a host-specific
default.nixfile, then retainconfiguration.nixandhardware-configuration.nixalongside it for host- and hardware-specific configuration. I've found this makes it very easy to onboard new hosts, since files generated upon a default install can largely be retained.