melo-nix-setup

Setup

This repo encapsulates a range of Nix goodies that I use to declutter and bring order to my entire laptop environment, including:

• My nix-darwin and Home Manager configuration
• Shell aliases and helper scripts

Before You Begin

You must change the following:

• Change the username and hostname to your specs in flake.nix and ./home-manager/*.nix. Username would be your name you have assigned to your local computer and hostname is already done but to understand what is being pulled, run the following command: hostname -s or scutil --get LocalHostName.

Setup Nix On Local Workstation

Note

For your first install, this will take around 10-15 minutes to setup so grab a drink and some popcorn as it runs it's process. To make life easier, I created a Makefile to install the pre-requisites necessary for your local workstation:

git clone https://github.com/romelBen/melo-nix-setup.git melo-nix-setup
cd melo-nix-setup
make

With Nix installed and flakes enabled, this is all that I need to run to stand up a new machine according to my exact specifications, including configuration for Vim, zsh, Visual Studio Code, Git, and more. With this approach, this will eliminate [Homebrew] in use from my machine.

Troubleshooting

You will receive an error when running the command make:

error: experimental Nix feature 'nix-command' is disabled; use '--extra-experimental-features nix-command'; to override

This is something I am fixing currently so this will soon be removed. To fix this issue, all that is needed to run is the following command:

echo "experimental-features = nix-command flakes" | sudo tee /etc/nix/nix.conf

Once ran, rerun make and you should be good as new.

Testing

For testing purposes in Mac, it will be best to use UTM and setup an environment similar to your own for macOS:

1. Install UTM
2. Download macOS IPSW recovery file
3. Create a macOS VM in UTM using the downloaded IPSW file
4. Run xcode-select --install in the new VM
5. (Optional) Clone the VM to a new one for easy rollback (UTM doesn't support snapshot yet)
6. Run the above commands of your choice: nix build or nix develop.

Acknowledgements

Great inspiration on utilizing Nix setup is from Luc Perkins in his blog and repository which was a great help:

• Building a highly optimized home environment with Nix
• nome