Installing on a New System

mkdir -p "$HOME/git"
cd "$HOME/git"
git clone [email protected]:mrjones2014/dotfiles.git
cd "dotfiles/"
jj git init --colocate # if you use Jujutsu

Available Hosts

NixOS

If you’re installing on a server, see the NixOS manual for headless NixOS installation instructions first. Once you’ve got your disks partitioned and NixOS installed, come back here and continue. For desktop computers, you can just use the graphical GNOME NixOS installer, since we’ll be installing GNOME anyway.

Make sure to set up full disk encryption, and update the fileSystems options for the disks that are on your machine, and hardware-configuration.nix as needed.

Simply run NIX_CONFIG="experimental-features = nix-command flakes" sudo nixos-rebuild switch ~/git/dotfiles/.#edgerunner (replacing .#edgerunner with your desired flake output target). After the first time, you can just run nh os switch. This uses nix-community/nh.

macOS

On macOS, first install Lix, and when asked, make sure to choose yes to enable flakes. Then, for the first install, you’ll need to run nix-darwin as sudo via nix run:

sudo nix run nix-darwin/master#darwin-rebuild -- switch --flake $HOME/git/dotfiles/.#aldecaldo

After that, you can just run nh darwin switch.

Managing Dotfiles

Dotfiles are managed via Nix, using flake.nix and home-manager. On NixOS, the home-manager configuration is managed as a NixOS module, so simply rebuilding your NixOS config also applies the new home-manager config. On macOS, the same behavior is achieved via nix-darwin.

On both, I use nh, which simplifies the CLI as well as automatically managing some things like better cleanup/garbage collection, as well as build tree visualization via nix-output-monitor.

• NixOS: nh os switch
• macOS: nh darwin switch