In Home Manager, why use a module instead of a package and config file?

• Home Manager using Nix

  182 5,903 9.8 Nix

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

  

With Home Manager, I can do the same as I would on Arch, but I can also instead use a module: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/blob/master/modules/programs/kitty.nix

• nixpkgs

  975 15,656 10.0 Nix

  Nix Packages collection & NixOS

  

However, Nix modules are designed to integrate a package with the entire system. For example, in that Kitty home-manager module, it defines xdg.configFile."kitty/kitty.conf", which manages the file ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf in a declarative way. The Kitty Nix module allows you to manage all of the parts of Kitty scattered around the system (such as its configuration file) in a declarative way, with all of the benefits that declarative and immutable configuration files bring (rollbacks, easy saving in git, easy provisioning on new machines, ...). In this specific case of Kitty, that doesn't sound that helpful. However, for complicated services such as Nextcloud with many options, the Nextcloud NixOS module allows you to easily declaratively specify Nextcloud settings without having to mess with random configuration files.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project