branjam4 / branos-provisioning

Provisioning script for my custom exwm guix vm

BranOS

Provisioning my custom guix virtual machine for testing emacs28 inside EXWM.

Flow

This script clones scheme manifests which install emacs 28 (https://github.com/flatwhatson/guix-channel) along with packages I want to use with emacs. Then, I clone doom, chemacs, my emacs 28 doom config, and my exwm config. I make some modifications to ~/.bashrc and create symlinks for chemacs. Then I install doom for the emacs ran by Emacs X Window Manager (emacs 27 in my case).

Installing doom with emacs 28 wasn’t stable when I made these scripts, so there’s just a friendly statement at the end reminding the user to run doom’s install command manually, and multiple times if necessary.

Warnings

Do not try this at home

This script is public so people working with it can clone it without credentials on their copy of the virtual machine. I do not recommend running it in any case outside of its intended one: demonstrating how to provision my personal guix system image to run emacs 28 inside a running EXWM.

This script is mostly idempotent with respect to that use case. But .bashrc gets altered and .emacs.d gets moved without warning–not very kind side effects.

Not for the faint of heart

Running this script in the VM requires 2, if not 4 GB of memory on the VM, along with ~30GB of space available on its drive.

It will also take a while to build dependencies, both in guix’s case and in doom’s case. The positive spin here is that because packages installed with guix “work on my machine” they will work on your version of my machine too, as I’ve pinned them in a channel-specs.scm file in my emacs manifest repo. I have not yet gotten around to freezing doom, but that is straightforward in the event future doom updates change current functionality.

Instructions

I run the following inside the vm:

git clone https://github.com/branjam4/branos-provisioning ~/branos-provisioning
pushd ~/branos-provisioning
chmod +777 doom-install.sh
./doom-install.sh 2>&1 | tee install-logs.org

# optional
popd

Both guix and doom are quite verbose by default, so I have the logs in an org file so I can look at them later in emacs (thanks to https://github.com/mengwong/git-scrape for the tip on making scripts org-mode friendly!).

Results

Regardless of whether you run this, my virtual machine image boots straight into a vanilla emacs 27 exwm instance.

By the end of the script’s execution you should have:

1. emacs 28 along with dependencies for doom emacs, in a main-emacs guix profile.
2. chemacs, with a preconfigured .emacs.profiles.el symlinked to where chemacs expects it.
3. A doom installation for the “default” EXWM emacs (may only work after closing/restarting EXWM. It will immediately reopen after you exit).
4. ~/.bashrc snippets which ensure you can use M-x shell in EXWM, run emacs, and have it run a separate version of emacs and doom. See below though.

Do this next!

Make sure to actually install doom on emacs28! I have not yet automated this.

~/doom-emacs/bin/doom -y install

At this point, Doom Emacs fully takes over scripting. However, async jobs might stay at a large number for too long (e.g. Waiting for 1422 async jobs). I had to play it by ear, but if it isn’t making progress, stop the process (C-c C-c) and run it again.