digga VS Home Manager using Nix

Compare digga vs Home Manager using Nix and see what are their differences.

digga

A flake utility library to craft shell-, home-, and hosts- environments. (by divnix)

Home Manager using Nix

Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee] (by nix-community)
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digga Home Manager using Nix
23 181
977 5,690
0.4% 6.2%
2.4 9.8
8 months ago 4 days ago
Nix Nix
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

digga

Posts with mentions or reviews of digga. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-08.
  • Looking for dotfiles repo examples
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    I am using the home-manager input define in the flake andas recommended by digga. I am using the home namespace:
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    I have been playing with digga for a few days in order to simplify my dotfiles repo. But I only got it half-working and there are little to no - useful - docs.
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    This one issue may clear things up, seems like my config is a little outdated: https://github.com/divnix/digga/pull/385
  • Building a highly optimized home environment with Nix
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Sep 2022
    I'm new to the Nix world, but so far I've come across Divnix's Digga, Numtide's DevShell, and Misterio77's nix-starter-configs.
  • Need for a configuration framework?
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 7 Sep 2022
    There are config templates / configuration helper libraries that try to make this easier, for example digga/devos.
  • Sharing configuration between NixOS and MacOS
    6 projects | /r/NixOS | 25 May 2022
    The digga library, while being more complex to use than other solutions here, got a pretty elegant solution for it merged a few weeks ago. Still some cracks that are getting smoothed over, but it seems to work.
  • Best practices for organizing code repository for multiple machines? What about deployment?
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 10 Apr 2022
    I like the concept digga/devos uses (unfortunately their stuff kind of is an overengineered incomprehensible mess): They use: - modules: for modules like in nixpkgs (i.e. stuff that defines options and generates configuration based on that options; are included into every host) - profiles: concrete configuration, can be included to host definitions - suites: sets of profiles (so you can for example have a desktop suite with all your profiles with "desktop" configuration options and apply that to all your desktop computers)
  • Nix: An idea whose time has come
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2022
  • The Curse of NixOS
    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2022
    https://github.com/divnix/devos is something close to a framework.

    I agree that language is too simple. Also I think some degree of IDE / language server support would help a lot. Refactoring modules, writing and importing custom functions was a bad experience for me - some arcane stacktraces were common, using repl was too verbose and with no clear way to debug whole configuration.

    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2022
    For the system, I like the devos template:

    https://github.com/divnix/devos

    The idea of flakes is how you define inputs, and you define the system (and packages, and shell etc.) in the outputs using the inputs. The inputs are git repos which point to other flakes. You can mix and match these as much as you want (see the devos repo for examples) and when you build the derivation, it generates a lockfile for exact commits in that point in time what were used in the given inputs.

    You commit the lockfile and in the other systems where you pull your config from the repo, it uses exactly those commits and installs the same versions as you did in your other systems.

    This was quite annoying and hard to do before flakes. Now it's easy.

    The problem what people face with building their system as a flake is combining the packages so you can point to `jq` from the unstable nixos and firefox from the stable train. I think this aspect needs better documentation so it wouldn't be so damn hard to learn (believe me, I know). Luckily there are projects like devos that give a nice template for people to play with (with documentation!)

    Another use for flakes is to create a development shell for your repo, an example what I did a while ago:

    https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example

    Either have `nix-direnv` installed, enter the directory and say `direnv allow`, or just `nix develop` and it will gather, compile and install the correct versions of packages to your shell. Updating the packages? Call `nix flake update` in the directory, commit the lockfile and everybody else gets the new versions to their shell.

Home Manager using Nix

Posts with mentions or reviews of Home Manager using Nix. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-06.
  • How do I actually update home-manager?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Dec 2023
    $ 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
  • Possible to use KDE plugins on nixos?
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Dec 2023
    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
  • An Overview of Nix in Practice
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    > 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
  • Fake recruiter Lazarus lured aerospace employee with trojanized coding challenge
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Oct 2023
    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

  • Need help on home manager neovim config
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 11 Sep 2023
    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.
  • I want to like NixOS but... I can't and I need some help
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 12 Jul 2023
    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.
  • Silverblue users: why?
    4 projects | /r/Fedora | 23 Jun 2023
    This is indeed a blind spot. Thanks for pointing that out! Silverblue -to my knowledge- doesn't do a lot to address this. Though, 3rd-party tools like Home Manager and the suite of applications developed by the folks over at uBlue might be able to limit this to a minimum. Though I'm not sure if it surpasses NixOS in this regard; for the uninitiated. Though, to my knowledge, this requires special attention and depends on the specifics of the NixOS system in question.
  • My First Impressions of Nix
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jun 2023
  • I have a few beginner question, what is the difference between nix shell/env and what is the difference between flakes/home-manager?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 18 Jun 2023
    home-manager is a tool to manage your home with modules. It is like NixOS but for your home. It doesn't really have much to do with flakes except that you can use it with flakes.
  • Need some Help !
    4 projects | /r/NixOS | 13 Jun 2023
    By default, you can just configure everything in your profile the way you would in a normal Linux distro (dotfiles). The only exception is /etc (you need to manage those files from NixOS options). However, if you want to use Nix for your dotfiles, you can use home-manager.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing digga and Home Manager using Nix you can also consider the following projects:

Ansible - Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.

GNU Stow - GNU Stow - mirror of savannah git repository occasionally with more bleeding-edge branches

nixos-flake-example - This is a demo NixOS config, with optional flakes support. Along with notes on why flakes is useful and worth adopting.

NixOS-WSL - NixOS on WSL(2) [maintainer=@nzbr]

emacs-overlay - Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis]

chezmoi - Manage your dotfiles across multiple diverse machines, securely.

nix-darwin - nix modules for darwin

NixOS-docker - DEPRECATED! Dockerfiles to package Nix in a minimal docker container

yadm - Yet Another Dotfiles Manager

zinit - Flexible and fast Zsh plugin manager with clean fpath, reports, completion management, Turbo, annexes, services, packages.

AppImageLauncher - Helper application for Linux distributions serving as a kind of "entry point" for running and integrating AppImages

guix-nonfree - Unofficial collection of packages that are not going to be accepted in to guix