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home-manager template

This provides a quick-start template for using home-manager in a more reproducible way. You don't have to install home-manager, and it uses pinning.

Why?

home-manager is a great way to manage user-specific configuration ("dotfiles") in a reproducible way. This template takes reproducibility another step by making it so you do not need to install home-manager to use it, and do not need to install home-manager configuration files in a specific place.

Also, since this uses niv to pin nixpkgs and home-manager, you do not need nixpkgs on your path and can be sure the build will be the same on any computer.

Prerequisites

You must have nix installed on your machine.

curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Tutorial

  1. Click the "Use this template" button on GitHub

  2. Clone your repository onto the computer you want to configure

  3. Update dependencies (home-manager and nixpkgs) to the latest version:

    ./update-dependencies.sh

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "niv update"

  4. Edit ./home.nix to be how you want it.

  5. Run the switch script to switch to your configuration:

    ./switch.sh

    which is just shorthand for:

    nix-shell --run "home-manager switch"

Caveats

Since we do not install home-manager, you need to let home-manager manage your shell, otherwise it will not be able to add its hooks to your profile, e.g. no shell variables will get set by home-manager. Please consult home-manager documentation for exact required steps.

Also since we do not install home-manager, you cannot run the home-manager script from any directory and expect it to work. It must be run from within the nix-shell. (This is actually a feature!)