Dotfiles

This contains the Nix setup for my own robot army.

Each configuration is named with the pattern user@hostname since that's what Home Manager will look for by default when ran with a flake. You can always override that by specifying a custom config with the --flake option.

There are a few ways these dotfiles can be used depending on the situation.

You can reference this public repository to build or switch configurations.
You can clone this repository locally and reference it for build and switch.

If you clone the repository locally, you can optionally symlink it to ~/config/home-manager so that you don't need to specify the flake.nix location for commands.

# For example, if this project was cloned to ~/dotfiles
ln -s ~/dotfiles ~/.config/home-manager

Following conventions, if we symlinked our cloned repo and set our computer's hostname appropriately, running home-manager switch would be the same as specifying home-manager switch --flake ~/dotfiles#jon@megaman on the megaman machine.

Install Nix

Everything here requires Nix to be installed. As of the time this writing, you can install Nix a few different ways:

(recommended) Determinite Systems's installer
Following instructions on Nix's website

Once installed, you can verify it's setup by running nix --version.

If you use the default Nix install, you may need to add additional environment variables (like the following) and pass --impure when running some of the commands.

export NIX_CONFIG="experimental-features = nix-command flakes"

Activate a Configuration

Without Home Manager Installed

The first time you want to configure Home Manager, it probably won't be installed yet. You can use the following to run the latest version of Home Manager from its Nix flake:

# If you want to run the flake from the internet
nix run home-manager/master -- switch --flake github:jonknapp/dotfiles-v2#jon@megaman

# or if you want to run it against a local copy
cd dotfiles # wherever the flake.nix file is located

# username and hostname match a configuration
nix run home-manager/master -- switch --flake .

# when you want to specify a configuration
nix run home-manager/master -- switch --flake .#jon@megaman

With Home Manager Installed

Once Home Manager is configured, you won't need to reference the online flake version and can instead run:

# If you want to run the flake from the internet
home-manager switch --flake github:jonknapp/dotfiles-v2#jon@megaman

# or if you want to run it against a local copy
cd dotfiles # wherever the flake.nix file is located

# username and hostname match a configuration
home-manager switch --flake .

# when you want to specify a configuration
home-manager switch --flake .#jon@megaman

Build a Configuration

You can also build a Home Manager configuration without immediately switching to it.

# If you want to run the flake from the internet
nix build github:jonknapp/dotfiles-v2#jon@megaman

# or if you want to run it against a local copy
cd dotfiles # wherever the flake.nix file is located
nix build .#jon@megaman

This requires manual activation by running ./result/activate once built.

Troubleshooting

To compare with what the latest recommended install would look like for Home Manager + flakes, you can run:

export NIX_CONFIG="experimental-features = nix-command flakes"
nix run home-manager/master -- init ~/example/path

This will make a fresh home.nix and flake.nix file in the folder ~/example/path/.

jonknapp / dotfiles-v2