digga VS nixpkgs-config

This one issue may clear things up, seems like my config is a little outdated: https://github.com/divnix/digga/pull/385

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.

There are config templates / configuration helper libraries that try to make this easier, for example digga/devos.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Flakes, especially the “see also” section. If you’re looking to use for NixOS config across multiple hosts, digga (see the repo for example template) is pretty nice for encapsulating a lot of boilerplate.

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.

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)

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.

Yes, I put the repository in ~/nix. My repository is based on devos, but I am thinking of switching to a different setup, because I don't want to depend on a framework which can be an issue in updating.

I no longer use the official way since I have switched to flakes. I am currently using a devos-based config, which is a boilerplate that depends on a Nix toolchain, but I plan on rewriting the config with flake-utils-plus. You probably can install home-manager using deploy-rs. See the following comment:

You can also take a look at my server configuration which uses flakes. And my separately-managed home-manager configuration which also uses flakes

My "rice": https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config

I configure my neovim through home-manager. My configuration. Pulling vimPlugins from nixpkgs should give you something which works with NixOS (or anywhere for that matter, NixOS is essentially a clean room).

My dot file repo.

Home-manager link My example setup

Reference: - home.nix entry - Which refers to it's own dedicated file

If you want to take nix for a spin, i would recommend trying home-manager. It's essentially NixOS, but for dot files. It can install packages and services in addition to manage configuration. Also, I've been able to get it work on NixOS, WSL2, ubuntu, and macOS. Personal configuration if you're curious how it would look.

> And about Home Manager, the reason why I think it's over-hyped is because it provides a declarative approach to something that was... already declarative. Your $XDG_CONFIG directory does not need a leaky Nix abstraction on top of it

I don't really agree, I spent about 30mins to get my home-manager config to support an m1 mac [0]. I don't really want to think how long it would take me to look up all of the homebrew package names, and learn a new package manager. Instead, I just pushed all of the linux-specific items into their own bin, a little more logic, and I was able to get back to a comfortable terminal + git + vim settings.

Also, nix exposes congruent configuration management[1]. The state of my system is an exact reflection of the configuration. With other tools like ansible, vagrant, etc, I would get reconciliation configuration which is close on initial install but configuration drift is an ever-present concern; not to mention that large recipes and playbooks can take a very long time to run. Going the homebrew route would be divergent configuration, it would be very hard for me to get back to a certain configuration. With nix (and by extension home-manager), I can version control the configuration, improve it, roll it back, w/e I want.

> Why would I write my i3 config in Nix??

You do get some type checking, although the iteration time would probably be similar. You could also just do `xsession.windowManager.i3.extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./i3.config;` if you really just wanted to wholesale read in your existing profile.

> I'd rather just use `nix-env` personally.

nix-env is a double edge sword. You can rollback (somewhat, I believe it's just a stack of all changes), which is an improvement. However, nix only retains the "derivation name" to try and management. But for packages like python38, if you try to upgrade it, it will determine that `python-3.11-a3` is the package which is the most up-to-date. I try to discourage using nix-env.

[0]: https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config/commit/37ddfefa1...

Here and full config here