home-manager

This NixOS configuration uses home-manager extensively for home environment configuration. Each of the home-manager users are placed in users/home-manager at the project root. Furthermore, they are typically deployed as part of the NixOS configuration and as stand-alone home-manager configuration (but not standalone configs in NixOS systems). For more information, see Declarative host management and Declarative user management.

Importing a home-manager config on NixOS

foodogsquared
foodogsquared

For NixOS systems, we do prefer deploying home-manager configurations as part of the whole system. This allows us to easily configure more than one home-manager user.

For NixOS systems, there are multiple ways to impart a home-manager user. The simplest way is to have it as a NixOS user and import it from there. Here’s an example of a NixOS user with a home-manager config. 

Unresolved directive in <stdin> - include::../../../../users/nixos/plover/default.nix[]

On the host configuration, you can then import it like so. 

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }: {
  imports = [ (lib.private.getUser "nixos" "plover") ]
}

But creating a dedicated NixOS user onto a file then importing the module just to use a home-manager is more of a hassle. It shouldn’t require much boilerplate. This is why this project has created a function for it: mapHomeManagerUser.

An example of how to use it
lib.private.mapHomeManagerUser "foo-dogsquared" {
  extraGroups = [
    "adbusers"
    "wheel"
    "audio"
    "docker"
    "podman"
    "networkmanager"
    "wireshark"
  ];
  hashedPassword =
    "$6$.cMYto0K0CHbpIMT$dRqyKs4q1ppzmTpdzy5FWP/V832a6X..FwM8CJ30ivK0nfLjQ7DubctxOZbeOtygfjcUd1PZ0nQoQpOg/WMvg.";
  isNormalUser = true;
  createHome = true;
  home = "/home/foo-dogsquared";
  description = "Gabriel Arazas";
}

It just takes the home-manager user from users/home-manager and a config of the user at users.users.<name> for the NixOS user.

User-specific modules

home-manager users may have user-specific modules structured similarly to Host-specific modules. The only difference is the namespace is expected at users.$USERNAME.

Here’s one example of how one would configure their user with this convention. 

{
  users.foo-dogsquared = {
    dotfiles.enable = false;

    programs = {
      browsers.brave.enable = true;
      browsers.firefox.enable = true;
      browsers.misc.enable = true;
      email.enable = true;
      email.thunderbird.enable = true;
      git.enable = true;
      keys.gpg.enable = true;
      keys.ssh.enable = true;
      research.enable = true;
      shell.enable = true;
      terminal-multiplexer.enable = true;
    };

    setups = {
      desktop.enable = true;
      fonts.enable = true;
      music.enable = true;
    };
  };
}

Like host-specific modules, you could structure it in whatever arbitrary criteria you deem necessary. This allows us to think about the specific state and purpose of the user while configuring it all the same as any other module rather than dumping it all and adapting it on a shared home-manager module.