impermanence VS digga

Compare impermanence vs digga and see what are their differences.

impermanence

Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz] (by nix-community)

digga

A flake utility library to craft shell-, home-, and hosts- environments. (by divnix)
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impermanence digga
32 23
850 977
11.9% 0.4%
5.9 2.4
about 1 month ago 8 months 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.

impermanence

Posts with mentions or reviews of impermanence. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-23.
  • 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.
  • NixOS for the Impatient
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2023
  • Interested in NixOS, have some questions
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 4 Apr 2023
    Some files in /etc (like saved networks) will still not be managed by NixOS, if you want to have full control over them use Impermanence
  • Upgrading to NixOS 22.11 Issue
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 24 Jan 2023
    { imports = [ (modulesPath + "/installer/scan/not-detected.nix") "${builtins.fetchGit { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware.git"; }}/system76" "${builtins.fetchGit { url = "https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence.git"; }}/nixos.nix" ];
  • Good guides for a non-developer using NixOS?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 26 Nov 2022
    There is a maintained collection of modules for running this kind of NixOS setup. It's called impermanence.
  • 48hrs with Fedora Silverblue and I'm SOLD. Question: does anyone else use a volatile home ?
    5 projects | /r/linux | 17 Nov 2022
    https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings https://nixos.org/ https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
  • First post, here's my home lab and how I use it every day (running Proxmox and NixOS)
    3 projects | /r/homelab | 14 Nov 2022
    I'm also fascinated by the idea of completely decoupling the state from the configuration using https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence. If you can get your system working without leftover state sticking around, and continuously back up the state you do have, you're almost guaranteed to have a fully working environment at all times.
  • First post, here's what my homelab does running Proxmox and NixOS
    3 projects | /r/homelab | 13 Nov 2022
    Drop Proxmox for vanilla NixOS + kvm. Working towards impermanence to manage persistent state everywhere.
  • Nix: Taming Unix with Functional Programming
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2022
    docs nixos: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/

    This tooling includes higher-level helpers for language-/environment-specific packaging, like "buildGoModule", "buildRustPackage" and so on, as well as e.g. tooling to run integration tests in a whole cluster of inter-connected linux VMs!

    Packages which are submitted to nixpkgs must fulfill certain criteria, such as not using "IFD" (input-from-derivation, to simplify: "letting nix evaluate nix-code which was generated by another deriviation/"nix package".

    nixpkgs is alive and well with lots of daily contribution and an everlasting effort to keep Hydra, the nix-specific CI/CD system and public binary caches up to date and responsive. Thanks to all maintainers & contributors!

    * flakes are an approach to standardize a way to package nix code outside of nixpkgs but to still keep it re-usable. They are still "experimental" as the details are figured out, but nevertheless used in production. There are some frame-works to keep boilerplate low, like "flake-utils", "flake-parts" and others, as well as e.g. deployment tools like "colmena" and "deploy-rs" and re-usable helpers for system-configuration like e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence

    There's lots of other stuff in the community, things like home-manager, direnv + flakes and devshells changed my workflow fundamentally to the better since I've switched. If you got the time and are still interested, join us on matrix or elsewhere :)

  • How can you keep a Linux installation tidy and minimal?
    2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 22 Jun 2022
    I haven't set this up for my personal machines yet but you can trivially use a tmpfs as your / and then use impermanence to explicitly opt into stateful files and directories that you want to keep across reboots like login passwords, host keys etc.

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.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing impermanence and digga you can also consider the following projects:

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

nixos-config - Mirror of https://code.balsoft.ru/balsoft/nixos-config

nixos - My NixOS Configurations

sops-nix - Atomic secret provisioning for NixOS based on sops

home-manager - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee] [Moved to: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager]

nix-darwin - nix modules for darwin

nix-config - Nix configurations

nixos-generators - Collection of image builders [maintainer=@Lassulus]

nixos - A fully automated replicable nixos configuration set

nixpkgs - My Nix system configs!

flake-utils-plus - Use Nix flakes without any fluff.

raspi-overlayroot - Protect your SD card against wear and tear