708074ae6d
Import-from-derivation (IFD) has problematic performance, and is disabled in Nixpkgs by policy. It is arguably good practice for libraries to avoid it whenever possible, as it has poor ergonomics in some cases, especially with dry builds, as it requires multiple eval+build phases. As such, prevent its use in Home Manager by default by putting existing tests that use IFD behind a config. In CI, run a first pass with IFD disabled, skipping tests without the config. Then run a second pass with IFD enabled and including tests with the config. This second pass will also run tests without the config, but they should be cached from the previous run, so the cost is not double (only eval time should be paid twice). It’s necessary to change from using NMT’s `run` to `build` as `run` itself uses IFD. Of the tests that have the config: - kitty/theme-to-themeFile: this is a test for deprecated config, and so should be removed eventually anyway - podman: the implementation relies on IFD to create individual systemd units from the derivation output, and so it is not straightforward to remove the IFD; doing so would require rethinking how the module works to instead have the systemd unit files included as-is rather than as individually configured units in the Nix config. |
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| .github | ||
| docs | ||
| home-manager | ||
| lib | ||
| modules | ||
| nix-darwin | ||
| nixos | ||
| templates | ||
| tests | ||
| .editorconfig | ||
| .git-blame-ignore-revs | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .gitlab-ci.yml | ||
| default.nix | ||
| flake-module.nix | ||
| flake.lock | ||
| flake.nix | ||
| format | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| Makefile | ||
| overlay.nix | ||
| README.md | ||
| release.json | ||
| xgettext | ||
Home Manager using Nix
This project provides a basic system for managing a user environment using the Nix package manager together with the Nix libraries found in Nixpkgs. It allows declarative configuration of user specific (non-global) packages and dotfiles.
Usage
Before attempting to use Home Manager please read the warning below.
For a systematic overview of Home Manager and its available options, please see:
If you would like to contribute to Home Manager, then please have a look at "Contributing" in the manual.
Releases
Home Manager is developed against nixpkgs-unstable branch, which often causes
it to contain tweaks for changes/packages not yet released in stable NixOS.
To avoid breaking users' configurations, Home Manager is released in branches
corresponding to NixOS releases (e.g. release-24.11). These branches get
fixes, but usually not new modules. If you need a module to be backported, then
feel free to open an issue.
Words of warning
Unfortunately, it is quite possible to get difficult to understand errors when working with Home Manager. You should therefore be comfortable using the Nix language and the various tools in the Nix ecosystem.
If you are not very familiar with Nix but still want to use Home Manager then you are strongly encouraged to start with a small and very simple configuration and gradually make it more elaborate as you learn.
In some cases Home Manager cannot detect whether it will overwrite a previous manual configuration. For example, the Gnome Terminal module will write to your dconf store and cannot tell whether a configuration that it is about to be overwritten was from a previous Home Manager generation or from manual configuration.
Home Manager targets NixOS unstable and NixOS version 24.11 (the current stable version), it may or may not work on other Linux distributions and NixOS versions.
Also, the home-manager tool does not explicitly support rollbacks at the
moment so if your home directory gets messed up you'll have to fix it yourself.
See the rollbacks section for instructions on how to manually perform a
rollback.
Now when your expectations have been built up and you are eager to try all this out you can go ahead and read the rest of this text.
Contact
You can chat with us on IRC in the channel #home-manager on OFTC. There is also a Matrix room, which is bridged to the IRC channel.
Installation
Home Manager can be used in three primary ways:
-
Using the standalone
home-managertool. For platforms other than NixOS and Darwin, this is the only available choice. It is also recommended for people on NixOS or Darwin that want to manage their home directory independently of the system as a whole. See "Standalone installation" in the manual for instructions on how to perform this installation. -
As a module within a NixOS system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running
nixos-rebuild. See "NixOS module" in the manual for a description of this setup. -
As a module within a nix-darwin system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running
darwin-rebuild. See "nix-darwin module" in the manual for a description of this setup.
Home Manager provides both the channel-based setup and the flake-based one. See Nix Flakes for a description of the flake-based setup.
Translations
Home Manager has basic support for internationalization through gettext. The translations are hosted by Weblate. If you would like to contribute to the translation effort then start by going to the Home Manager Weblate project.
License
This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.