nixos-mailserver VS Home Manager using Nix

Hello. I have a server running NixOS. Webserver etc. works well and without problems. I tried to install the Simple NixOS Mailserver (https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver). After configure it the incoming mail works fine (IMAP: mail.domain.com on port 993) but the mails won't go out.

If you are familiar with NixOS, and like to have everything declared in Nix configuration, Simple NixOS Mailserver is very robust and easy to use. Have been using it for ~2 years.

https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

I was able to set up a reliable email server using Simple NixOS Mailserver following the guide.

I just finished setting up my mail server on my nixos VPS (also huge thanks to nixos-infect devs), it was super easy. Just follow the guide and you have a working 10/10 mail server, I had no bumps along the way and everything just works. It even has flake support which I used. Check out the repo simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.

I’ve been using nixos-mailserver for a while now: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver It’s using dovecot and postfix.

If your willing to do some tinkering I recommend simple-nixos-mailserver. I don't use nixos much, but I do find its very good at this one thing.

If you have the option to install NixOS (or convert the preinstalled distro), I can recommend Simple NixOS Mailserver. It is a complete solution (postfix, dovecot, rspamd), and can easily be extended with roundcube webmail.

I recently got into running my own NixOS server—setting up Nextcloud[0], a website[1], DNS server and most recently a mail server[2] were all incredibly easy, in fact, setting up DNS records is more involved than configuring a mail server on NixOS! This was all done on a server with less than 10 GB of disk space as well.

With additional software such as NixOps, personal servers can also be easily spun up and provisioned.

While inevitably there are rough edges if you look deeply enough, I think the default OOTB experience has been incredible for use on a server and as a day-to-day distro. Highly predictable and declarative configurations is the way to go.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/ffaaacf8888a5c4167b...

[1] https://siraben.dev

[2] https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

{ config, pkgs, ... }: let nixos-unstable = import { config = removeAttrs config.nixpkgs.config [ "packageOverrides" ]; }; in { imports = [ # Include the results of the hardware scan. ./hardware-configuration.nix (builtins.fetchTarball { url = "https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver/-/archive/nixos-21.05/nixos-mailserver-nixos-21.05.tar.gz"; sha256 = "1fwhb7a5v9c98nzhf3dyqf3a5ianqh7k50zizj8v5nmj3blxw4pi"; }) ]; disabledModules = [ "services/misc/mautrix-telegram.nix" "services/misc/matrix-synapse.nix" "services/misc/matrix-appservice-irc.nix" "services/web-apps/jitsi-meet.nix" "services/networking/jitsi-videobridge.nix" "services/networking/jicofo.nix" ]; nixpkgs = { overlays = [ # *snip* some local package definitions ]; config = { allowUnfree = true; packageOverrides = pkgs: { mautrix-telegram = nixos-unstable.mautrix-telegram; matrix-synapse = nixos-unstable.matrix-synapse; matrix-appservice-irc = nixos-unstable.matrix-appservice-irc; jitsi-meet = nixos-unstable.jitsi-meet; jitsi-meet-prosody = nixos-unstable.jitsi-meet-prosody; jitsi-videobridge = nixos-unstable.jitsi-videobridge; jitsi-videobridge2 = nixos-unstable.jitsi-videobridge2; jitsi = nixos-unstable.jitsi; jicofo = nixos-unstable.jicofo; util-linux = nixos-unstable.util-linux; # required by matrix-synapse }; }; }; # ...

I'm running matrix-synapse, nextcloud (in a nixos container), mumble, gitlab, vaultwarden, some game servers (i.e. Minecraft) and even my own mailserver with simple-nixos-mailserver.

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ 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

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

> 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

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

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

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.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

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.