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Recently I have been nagging people about nix and home-manager and I always get the same comment back “looks cool, how do I get started?”. Truth be told, the setup has a bit of a steep learning curve so figured I’d write a short blog post to point people in the right direction.
Before we begin, let me explain what the point of these tools are; to declaratively manage your environment/laptop/server. With this you should be able to declare your environment (required software, configurations, etc) and simply execute a command to let nix do its magic and keep your environment ready to use. In my personal case I use nixos (a linux distro with nix at its core) to manage my raspberry pi (which is out of the scope of this post) and nix-darwin and home-manager to manage both my personal and corporate laptops. Thanks to nix I can maintain both computers effortlessly, and, in case of having to reinstall any, have them up to speed in less than an hour after the OS is done installing.
If you are still interested, you need three pieces to manage macos:
nix itself, which you can install following the instructions herenix-darwin, which you can install following these other instructionshome-manager as a “nix channel” as instructed hereOk, now that you are ready, let’s try it out. We are going to do the following:
zsh as our shell and to make use of tools like ohmyzsh, thefuck, fzf and jumpgit declarativelynix using docker desktop for mac)virtualenvwrapper and poetrygolangStart by editing the file .nixpkgs/darwin-configuration.nix and adding (don’t forget to change the user accordingly):
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{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
imports = [
<home-manager/nix-darwin>
./git.nix
./zsh.nix
];
# List packages installed in system profile. To search by name, run:
# $ nix-env -qaP | grep wget
environment.systemPackages = [
];
# Auto upgrade nix package and the daemon service.
# services.nix-daemon.enable = true;
nix.package = pkgs.nix;
programs.zsh.enable = true;
# Used for backwards compatibility, please read the changelog before changing.
# $ darwin-rebuild changelog
system.stateVersion = 4;
# hide the dock automatically
system.defaults = {
dock = {
autohide = true;
orientation = "bottom";
};
};
# keeping docker clean
launchd.user.agents.dockerclean = {
script ="/usr/local/bin/docker system prune --volumes -f";
serviceConfig.StartCalendarInterval = [
{ Minute = 20; Hour = 11;}
];
};
home-manager.useUserPackages = true;
home-manager.users.dbarroso = { pkgs, ... }: {
home.packages = with pkgs; [
jump
poetry
python38Packages.virtualenv
python38Packages.virtualenvwrapper
thefuck
silver-searcher
];
programs.fzf = {
enable = true;
};
programs.go = {
enable = true;
};
};
}
In addition, you should edit ~/.nixpkgs/git.nix and enter something similar to:
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{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
# my global gitignore
home-manager.users.dbarroso.home.file."gitignore" = {
text = ''
tags
.DS_Store
'';
target = ".gitignore";
};
home-manager.users.dbarroso.programs.git = {
enable = true;
userName = "David Barroso";
userEmail = "fake@email.com";
extraConfig = {
core = {
excludesFile = "~/.gitignore";
};
pull = {
rebase = false;
};
url = {
"ssh://git@github.com" = {
insteadOf = "https://github.com";
};
};
};
};
}
And finally, edit ~/.nixpkgs/zsh.nix and add:
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{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
home-manager.users.dbarroso.programs.zsh = {
enable = true;
enableAutosuggestions = true;
enableCompletion = true;
oh-my-zsh = {
enable = true;
theme = "robbyrussell";
plugins = [
"dash"
"docker"
"docker-compose"
"git"
"golang"
];
};
initExtra = ''
. virtualenvwrapper.sh
eval "$(jump shell)"
eval $(thefuck --alias)
if [ -e /Users/dbarroso/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh ]; then . /Users/dbarroso/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh; fi # added by Nix installer
'';
};
}
Once you have your config ready you just have to execute:
1
darwin-rebuild switch
And your system should be ready :)
For reference, other stuff I manage with this includes things like:
I know this was sparse on details but hopefully this was enough to get you interested and point you in the right direction.