home-manager VS nixpkgs

Compare home-manager vs nixpkgs and see what are their differences.

home-manager

Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee] [Moved to: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager] (by rycee)
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home-manager nixpkgs
4 3
1,753 374
- -
9.1 7.9
about 3 years ago 5 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.

home-manager

Posts with mentions or reviews of home-manager. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-22.
  • [Help] Home-manager service?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Apr 2023
    I really am at lost rn, foud this github issue tried the solution and it didn't work.
  • NixOS and Neovim plugins
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 24 Oct 2022
  • Flakes, nixos and home-configuration help
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 7 May 2022
    { config, pkgs, ... }: { imports = [ (import "${builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz}/nixos") ]; users.users = { jdoe = { isNormalUser = true; initialPassword = "1234"; extraGroups = [ "wheel" ]; }; }; home-manager.useUserPackages = true; home-manager.users.jdoe = { home.stateVersion = "21.11"; programs.home-manager.enable = true; programs.git.userName = "John"; programs.git.userEmail = "Doe"; programs.zsh.zplug = { enable = true; plugins = [ { name = "zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions"; } { name = "romkatv/powerlevel10k"; tags = [ as:theme depth:1 ]; } { name = "ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh oh-my-zsh"; } { name = "ajeetdsouza/zoxide"; } { name = "marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete"; } { name = "marlonrichert/zsh-edit"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions"; } { name = "ptavares/zsh-exa"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting"; } { name = "mbenford/zsh-tmux-auto-title"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search"; } ]; }; services.gpg-agent = { enable = true; defaultCacheTtl = 1800; enableSshSupport = true; }; }; }
  • How do I do declarative package management using nix package manager on Debian?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Jan 2021
    There are multiple ways of managing declarative profiles. 1) Attrset, compatible with imperative use of nix-env https://git.io/fAQHW ; 2) buildEnv, providing more control over the paths that are linked into the profile https://git.io/fp0aU ; 3) home-manager, providing nixos-like config for your ~ https://github.com/rycee/home-manager

nixpkgs

Posts with mentions or reviews of nixpkgs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-26.
  • NixOS-generators – Collection of VM and Container disk image builders for NixOS
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2024
    I’ve found it most helpful to review other people’s configurations to learn Nix.

    Some specific ones I really like:

    https://github.com/malob/nixpkgs

    https://github.com/fufexan/dotfiles

    I keep a not comprehensive GitHub Stars list of Nix stuff I find here if you want more:

    https://github.com/stars/heywoodlh/lists/nix

    If you aren’t familiar, Nix-Darwin allows you to codify your MacOS deployments in a fashion comparable to NixOS. As a huge Nix-Darwin user myself, I have found malob’s repo extremely helpful for ideas with MacOS configuration. Nix-Darwin has made me so happy as a MacOS user. :)

    Some other unsolicited tips:

    1. Start with Nix flakes for configuration

    2. Invest in Home-Manager before NixOS or Nix-Darwin

    3. Ask people for help in Matrix or Discourse — my experience is that Nix-related folk are very welcoming and understanding

    Good luck!

  • How do you set git in order to clone from private repo?
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 13 May 2023
    I don't think system.autoUpgrade will work at all with flakes since you'd need to update your flake lock file for anything to get updated. I've seen a way to do that automatically with github actions here.
  • Nix Flake working on Darwin, but darwin-rebuild doesn't recognize --experimental-features flag
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 13 Aug 2021
    https://github.com/malob/nixpkgs/discussions/6 (discussion on how to bootstrap a Flake file on Darwin)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing home-manager and nixpkgs you can also consider the following projects:

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

nix-doom-emacs - doom-emacs packaged for Nix

nixpkgs-wayland - Automated, pre-built packages for Wayland (sway/wlroots) tools for NixOS. [maintainers=@colemickens, @Artturin]

impermanence - Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz]

rust-nix-template - Rust project template with Nix (Flakes) and VSCode support

nix-config - :space_invader: NixOS configuration

environment - dotfiles

nixos-vscode-server - Visual Studio Code Server support in NixOS

solana-nix - The Solana CLI tools packaged up with Nix

gitignore.nix - Nix functions for filtering local git sources

nixcfg - NixOS and Home-Manager configs for my devices. dotfiles, but way better