Home Manager is used to manage per-user packages and daemons. It's also used to generate configuration files for some software, but this dotfiles mostly stick to hand-written configuration files and relies on the Nix-agnostic setup.sh for deployment where it makes sense.
This document focuses on aspects of Home Manager configuration that are unique to this dotfiles. Detailed usage instructions for Home Manager itself can be found in the official manual.
Home Manager is responsible for per-user settings while NixOS and nix-darwin manages system-wide settings. This dotfiles uses both.
When choosing where to place a given configuration, prefer Home Manager over system-wide configuration unless there's a reason not to. This would provide the following benefits:
- Home Manager is usable on any Linux distro with Nix installed
- Home Manager can share configuration between Linux and macOS
- You can enjoy up to date packages with Home Manager while using stable packages for NixOS / nix-darwin
While Home Manager is a convenient method for package management, it's not exactly good practice to install anything and everything with it. For software tied to a specific project, it's recommended to keep the installation local to that project instead of installing it globally. Nix handles this pretty well with nix-shell and direnv. Direnv's wiki contains a detailed explanation about this setup. nix-direnv, which further integrates the two, is also included as part of the Home Manager configuration for this dotfiles.
| Directory | Contents |
|---|---|
modules |
Contains custom Home Manager modules |
profiles |
Contains profiles |
machines |
Contains configuration for each host |
A profile basically refers to a Home Manager module. The distinction is somewhat
arbitrary, but a module targeting a specific piece of software is placed in
modules while a module targeting a specific use case is placed in profiles.
Multiple Home Manager configurations can be defined, and Home Manager will use
the one with the matching hostname unless specified otherwise via command line
arguments. Configuration for each host are defined in machines, so
make sure to add new hosts in there as necessary. If no hostname matches are
found, Home Manager would attempt to find a match based on the username instead.
Add them to this file. Here's an example of how this
might look like for a host named pod042:
pod042 = mkHome {
configuration = {
dotfiles.profiles.enableAll = true;
};
stateVersion = "21.11";
};mkHome is a wrapper for homeManagerConfiguration that bundles
custom Home Manager modules in this dotfiles repository.
There's also an importHome function that allows you to split out the
configuration into a separate file. To use this, replace mkHome with the
below:
pod042 = importHome ./pod042.nix { stateVersion = "21.11"; };Then move the configuration into pod042.nix:
{
dotfiles.profiles.enableAll = true;
}Finally, it's also possible to place host configuration in a separate repository
by creating a new Nix flake that takes this repository as input. See the
description in the templates directory for more details.
This dotfiles introduces a few additional options for Home Manager. Here's some of the interesting ones:
- dotfiles.profiles.minimal.enable
- Installs the bare minimum amount of packages needed for the dotfiles to function. Enabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.essential.enable
- Installs essential packages for servers and desktops alike. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.extras.enable
- Installs nice to have packages. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.development.enable
- Installs development packages. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.debugTools.enable
- Installs debugging tools. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.fonts.enable
- Installs recommended fonts. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.desktop.enable
- Installs essential packages for desktop environemnts. It can be enabled for both Linux and macOS. Disabled by default.
- dotfiles.profiles.enableAll
- Enables all of the above. Disabled by default.