nix-starter-configs VS devenv

Is this an example of what you mean (home-manager is defined as part of the flake): https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs/blob/main/minimal/flake.nix

All the resources mentioned in other comments are pretty good, but mostly they are unofficial. The official NixOS wiki is very outdated and unmaintained. You will have better luck reading other people’s configurations, nixpkgs source code and GitHub issues. For the nix language the official wiki is a nice reference https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html. This configuration is a great starting point https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for learning by example. It covers most of what you may need, although bootstrapping your own config is quite rough. You may want to take a look at https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs. It’s very basic and should be simple to understand and improve.

Another good option: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs

I started with this one, the minimal version, then moved on to something more like the standard version, and now I'm moving on to something based on his much more complicated and flexible build in a different repo. I had been flailing, then this repo made it click.

Hi all, I'd like to install Gnome using the unstable overlay; I used https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs as a template, my sistem is on the stable source and I install packages from the unstable branch using "unstable.pkg". Given that Gnome is installed by

So, it took me an inordinate amount of effort to get to this point, but I find managing my nixos laptop to be idiotically easy now. And, to be clear, I'm not a developer. I just want an easy to use config that I can port over to a new laptop when the time is right (and maybe port a similar config over to my desktop as well, once I get around to installing NixOS).

It's very weird, because I went from "WHY IN GOD'S NAME WOULD ANYONE WANT THIS?" to "my life is now measurably better" over the span of about 48 hours, and I have no idea what clicked. Something about adding flakes to the mix (NixOS + HM + flakes) broke the logjam. Or maybe it was simply how damned useful this config was to learn from:

https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs

I went from that to a per-user, per-machine (with defaults for each) config in about an hour, and I haven't fundamentally changed that setup since. I have no idea why it's so compelling to me, but the combination of being able to tell the machine how to configure itself in one place with the ease of adding software ... I'm going to spin up a config this weekend and put it on my kid's laptop. There are other tools to accomplish the same thing, but NixOS is just so easy ... and poorly documented ... and has weird CLI conventions ... and doesn't do a super job of garbage control ... and

Hi, I created a new Flake based on Misterio77's template, then added Disko to it, as explained here. I also set disko.enableConfig = false; as they say is necessary when running from Installer.

I just went on this journey last weekend! It was a rough start but I started to feel a lot more productive when I found this guide on flakes and also used this repo as a starting template.

Ok thanks! This one: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs

take a look at misterios starter configs

I gave devenv multiple tries, and I am sorry to say there are multiple annoying issues that forced me to give up every time.

Some of these 200+ issues are unsolved for a fairly long time.

https://github.com/cachix/devenv/issues

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

https://devenv.sh/ and nix in general are great for setting up dev environments.

> but worried that the development is not moving forward

There is an open v1.0 PR: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/1005

2) A way to run services apps depend on (databases, job runners, cache etc).

I am going to suggest one of the Nix based tools that do those things:

  - https://devenv.sh/ (I use this at work)

Yup, I haven’t tried it but there is https://devenv.sh which is built on top of nix and makes it simple.

Although Guix reads better than Nix (after all, it's Lisp), I found the support and resources available for learning severely lacking.

Plus, you have to jump through hoops to install non-free software, which goes against the ethos of Guix anyway.

IMHO, Nix is clearly "the winner" here and we'll see more and more adoption as it improves. Lots of folks are doing exciting work (see https://determinate.systems/, https://devenv.sh/, https://flakehub.com/). And the scale and organization around nixpkgs is damn impressive.

I don't think you can ever get Nix as simple as PNPM, simply because native libraries are sometimes annoying, need to be configured at build time to a greater degree and because the problem space it attacks is so much larger than PNPM, which only deals with the JS/Node.js ecosystem.

However, I do think that there exist reasonable levels of abstraction that sacrifice some expressive power for simplicity and such systems could maybe expose a PNPM-like CLI. One example that comes to mind is devenv.nix [1]. While it doesn't yet have a CLI, its configuration file is YAML and relatively simple. I think there's more to be done in this space and I hope for tools that are easier to grasp in the future.

> Nix package files evaluate down to configuration for the Nix package manager, but I haven’t ever seen a good explanation for the basic essentials underneath all the abstraction. Every guide I’ve learned from and all the package defs I’ve read seem to cargo cult many layers of mysterious config composing config. Without easy to learn essentials it’s difficult to grok the system as a whole.

To me it sounds like the essential that you're referring to is the 'derivation' primitive, which is almost always hidden behind the mkDerivation abstraction from nixpkgs. This [2] blog post is an exploration of what exactly that means.

I'd also love for the documentation situation to be much better, in particular in terms of official, curated resources. But I'm not convinced that you actually need to know the difference between derivation and mkDerivation to make effective use of Nix, because in practice you would always use the latter. That said, mkDerivation and the whole of nixpkgs is essentially a huge DSL (I believe this is what you meant when you said 'config composing config') that you do need to know and is woefully underdocumented.

> I would love to adopt Nix for developer tooling for Notion’s engineers, but today it’s about infinity times easier to work around the limitations mentioned of Docker+Ubuntu+NPM than to work around the limitations of Nix.

One approach I have taken to is to specify the environment in Nix, but then generate Docker devcontainers from it, so most people don't come into contact with Nix if they don't want to.

[1] https://devenv.sh

[2] https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/derivations/

This though, through the use of devenv.sh, which uses nix, as when I got into nix I though it was going to be easier to just make a development environment, not the case. Until I found devenv.sh, I could actually finally make good environments... It also has other features like containers and services, which also help me know that I can get the most of it if the time comes.

Instructions: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/745