crate2nix VS Home Manager using Nix

I'll use nixpkgs' buildRustPackage. There's a few other tools, my favorite being crate2nix, but we'll leave that to a future tutorial.

If you want to iterate with nix instead of cargo, crate2nix and cargo2nix provides more caching and more fine control over your dependencies. I haven't used these two so you would have to decide for yourself. You may also want to try out nocargo for something more experimental.

I'm yet to try it out, but from the blog post, the README and the source it appears that Crane builds all dependencies in one derivation (separately from the main crate). This means that if a dependency gets added, removed or changed, all dependencies of a crate will be rebuilt. This is in contrast with https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix, which does build every dependency in a separate package, thus you don't need to rebuild other dependencies if you only change a small part of the tree.

Yes, you will have to package it if it's not already in nixpkgs.

The good news is once you learn how, it's basically trivial with crate2nix[0], which can autogenerate nix derivations from rust crates

[0] https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix

From my quick reading of cargo2nix's webpage yes. https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix has a workspaces section.

As for your two applications, they're both written in Rust, and I like https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix as a way to package Rust crates with Nix. BTW, wezterm is already in nixpkgs!

I like the way crate2nix works. I have made a flake template for it here. Sometimes it requires a couple of overrides to fix some misbehaving crates (see https://github.com/balsoft/simple-osd-daemons/blob/master/flake.nix#L29 for an example of such overrides), but otherwise it's fantastic. It doesn't require any hash nonsense, it downloads and builds all the crates separately (unlike naersk or other solutions) so you get all the benefits of Nix (reproducibility and proper caching).

Crate2nix might help: https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.