Nixos configuration with home manager in a default setup

Nixos

NixOS is a Linux distribution that is built around the Nix package manager. More information is in my previous post(s). This post is about the way I added home-manager to my (modular) Nixos configuration.

Including home-manager Link to heading

First home-manager needs to be added to the normal Nixos configuration. This can be done by adding just a few lines of code. See how to do this in the example below:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
  home-manager = builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-22.11.tar.gz";
in
{
  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
      ./t14s-hardware-configuration.nix
      ./parts/generic-boot-systemd.nix
      ./parts/generic-desktop.nix
      ./parts/generic.nix
      ./parts/virtualisation.nix
      ./parts/printing.nix

      ./parts/users.nix

      ./parts/apps-default.nix
      ./parts/apps-extra-cli.nix
      ./parts/apps-extra-desktop.nix
      ./parts/apps-extra-music.nix

      ./parts/fonts.nix

      "${home-manager}/nixos"
    ];

  # Home-manager profiles
  home-manager.users.patrick = import ./home/patrick-base-t14s.nix;

  ...

Notice:

the lines between let and in at the top of the file,
the import line ("${home-manager}/nixos"), and
the added profile line (home-manager.users.patrick = ...).

Also notice that the home-manager profile actually imports a nix configuration. This nix configuration is specific per person (since it is the users personal home-manager setup) so each user can have this import line.

Home manager configuration Link to heading

The basic home-manager configuration file is personal per user. However, multiple users can share imports from within that personal configuration file.

For example, my personal home-manager configuration file looks as follows:

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:

{
  # Home Manager settings
  #
  # https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/

  imports =
    [
      ./patrick-zshell.nix
      ./patrick-sway.nix
      ./patrick-git.nix
      ./generic-tealdeer.nix
      ./generic-tmux.nix
      ./generic-gammastep.nix
    ];

  # home-manager.useGlobalPkgs = true;  # Use the global pkgs that is configured via the system level nixpkgs options
  programs.home-manager.enable = true;  # Let Home Manager install and manage itself.

  home.username = "patrick";
  home.homeDirectory = "/home/patrick";

  # This value determines the Home Manager release that your
  # configuration is compatible with. This helps avoid breakage
  # when a new Home Manager release introduces backwards
  # incompatible changes.
  home.stateVersion = "22.11";
}

The home manager configuration is modularized in a similar fashion as my normal Nixos configuration. Therefore it shows files which are and are not prepaned with my username (patrick). Those with a username are for that user specifically.

Applying and updating the configuration Link to heading

This works in the same fashion as in my modular setup (see the previous blog post).