[AndrewUnmuted]

Nix and NixOS have had a similar sort of effect on me as Gentoo and FreeBSD have in the past. They have helped to expand my consciousness in the realm of systems administration and have helped me achieve new heights with my low latency audio configuration. For this reason, Nix and NixOS have become indispensable to my workflow.

NixOS introduces a new form of declarative configuration, fusing Gentoo's highly configurable nature with BSD's unified configuration file approach. For me, it's absolutely perfect until my own laziness bites me in the butt. If you want to do a gentle dive into Nix, resist the temptation to go full "NixOS" and learn the Nix build/environment system first. It will make things a lot easier for you in the long run.

[cole-h]

I'd also suggest that, once you _do_ feel comfortable enough to step foot into NixOS territory, that you start off by version-controlling your configuration. It doesn't necessarily have to be public, but I've found it very helpful in the past when I've had to debug various issues due to misconfiguration by me.

[wingmanjd]

Do you symlink your config repo to /etc/nixos or something else? So far, I've just been rsyncing my config repo folder after I modify it.

[cole-h]

I don't; my config lives in ~/flake, and I run `nixos-rebuild ... --flake ~/flake` whenever I update it.

[choward]

You don't have to specify the nixosConfiguration name (e.g ~/flake#my-configuration)? Do you just name it "default" or something for that to work? I've never tried that.

[cole-h]

Exactly as Macha said, if you name the attribute `nixosConfiguration.<hostname>`, `nixos-rebuild` will look for that attribute implicitly; you can still specify another configuration if you're e.g. in a VM or a live image.

[Macha]

You name it the same as your current system's hostname.

[choward]

Oh, I had no idea. I was actually already doing that. Guess I was just being extra verbose on the command line.

[grhmc]

You can actually put your NixOS config anywhere. Assuming you're not using flakes, `nixos-rebuild` finds the config through NIX_PATH:

grahamc@scruffy:~/ > echo $NIX_PATH

nixpkgs=/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos:nixos-config=/etc/nixos/configuration.nix:/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels

you can change the `nixos-config` value to point to somewhere else, or call it like this:`nixos-rebuild -I nixos-config=./configuration.nix`

[Filligree]

I use an update script that overrides that location to $(pwd), and also uses nvd to print a package diff for the update. Among a few other niceties. With flakes, that's a regular nixos-rebuild flag; otherwise it's an envvar.

/etc/nixos is just the default, there's a number of ways to set your own path. One of the simplest might be to put "import /home/wherever" as the sole contents of configuration.nix.

[cole-h]

That sounds like a nice little workflow; I might have to incorporate something like that with `nvd`...

Though, it should be said that `import /home/wherever` might not work if you switch to / use flakes, as that is likely outside of the flake's git repo (and thus impure).

[kevincox]

Yeah, I symlink `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` to my git repo. (I do keep a `hardware-configuration.nix` which isn't version controlled. I probably should add version-control at some point but for now it is simple enough to copy around and maybe make some minor tweaks).

[mfsch]

You can also use `git init --separate-git-dir=~/something /etc/nixos` to keep the git data in your user directory while the config remains in the default location. I like this solution because it keeps the stuff I want to do as root (configuring the system) separate from what I want to do as regular user (tracking changes of the configuration).