My NixOS and home-manager config + dotfiles

Note

The general structure of this configuration is based on Misterio77/nix-starter-configs.

Setup guide

If you plan on setting this up on macOS or another non-NixOS Linux distribution, you can skip ahead here.

Installing NixOS (optional)

Install NixOS on a new host by following the installation instructions in the NixOS manual. After successfully installing NixOS, proceed to the next section.

Setting up the system and home

Clone this repository (preferrably, under $HOME/my-nix-config). After that, from within the root folder of the repository, you can:

If you are on NixOS and want to configure it:

First, locate the hardware-configuration.nix that was generated during the installation under /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix, and copy it into the nixos folder of this repository. Rename it as desired, it will be referenced within the configuration.nix that you create for your current system.

After that, create a new host in the nixosConfigurations attribute in flake.nix. This host will be used from now on as an entrypoint to rebuild your current system with the specified configuration files.

Finally, you can run the following command to rebuild NixOS from the config specified for your host in flake.nix:

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ".#<host>"

If you want to build the home environment with home-manager:

On a NixOS system

Create a new user@host in the homeConfigurations attribute in flake.nix. This user@host will be used from now on as an entrypoint to rebuild your current home with the specified home-manager configuration files.

After that, you can build the home configuration with the following command:

home-manager switch --flake ".#<user>@<host>"

On a non-NixOS system

First, you must install the Nix package manager (or Determinate Nix), and after that install home-manager.

Then, create a new user@host in the homeConfigurations attribute in flake.nix. This user@host will be used from now on as an entrypoint to rebuild your current home with the specified home-manager configuration files.

After that, you can build the home configuration with the following command:

home-manager switch --flake ".#<user>@<host>"

[!WARNING] Installing home-manager in non-NixOS systems using Determinate Nix Starting from May 2025, if you have installed Determinate Nix instead of regular Nix, you will not be able to use the official approach for installing home-manager since it involves using the nix-channel command, which Determinate Nix no longer supports.

To build the home environment for the first time, run:

nix run nixpkgs#home-manager -- switch --flake ".#<user>@<host>"

and after that first activation succeeds, home-manager will be installed and you will be able to invoke it normally.

Enabling dotfiles for iTerm2 on macOS

If you are on macOS and want to use iTerm2, you will need to configure it to get the configuration from the dotfiles. To do that, enable the "Load settings from a custom folder or URL" checkbox, introduce the path to the iTerm2 dotfiles folder in there, and select "Save changes > Automatically" (if you want to save any changes you do in the configuration).

Interacting with attributes from the REPL

To play around with the flake and the attribute sets, you can open a REPL by running the following command from within the repository root folder:

nix repl --expr "builtins.getFlake \"$PWD\""

Then, load the attributes provided by nixpkgs:

:l <nixpkgs>

Finally, you can import any of the modules by passing it the necessary arguments:

common = import ./home-manager/common.nix {inherit config outputs; pkgs = homeConfigurations."david@yorha".pkgs;}

Common issues

error: path '/nix/store/<hash>-source/<some file>.nix' does not exist

This can happen if you have created a new file and tried to perform a nixos-rebuild or home-manager command without first staging that file in Git. Always remember to stage files before rebuilding!