Manage Your Dotfiles with Home Manager!

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel today we're talking about home manager so what is home manager home manager takes the philosophy of Nyx and Nyx OS and applies it to all of your dot files and user level applications rather than affecting the systemwide configuration it's focused on the user level configuration so just like the rest of Nyx OS home manager makes distinctive generations of all of your dot files every time you switch into a new configuration making it very easy to roll back your configuration if something goes wrong and the way that home manager accomplishes this is by taking NYX files like home. Nix and translating them into generated dot files which occupy the normal locations that they would as siming so for example if I open up a terminal and I just list everything in my home directory for example my zshrc you see that it's a Sim link to this thing in the Nyx store same thing with the zsh environment file um same thing with a ton of other things The Bash RC as well and you can imagine then that all of the dot files on your system whether it be your bash RC your emac config your neovim config your tiling Window Manager config all of these become these Sim links that are managed through the power of Nyx and this has a number of advantages to it one we already mentioned that it's really easy to roll back all of these and another thing is that home manager is really good at managing multiple different setups and allowing you to switch back and forth between them because whenever you switch into a new configuration it will tear down all of the previous configuration files and then put in the new ones that you specify so it's really nice if you want to have a few different setups or configurations at your disposal or also if you're trying to migrate from one setup to another this actually helped me quite a bit when I was trying to switch from xmonad to hyperland I had my xmonad set up in NYX OS I got it working it was optimized to my workflow and then I wanted to try hyperland home manager allowed me to experiment with hyperland and start configuring it while still being able to switch back to my xmonad config to do actual work whenever I needed to so that's sort of what home manager is and why it might be useful but how do we get started with it so there's a nice install guide at the home manager website here's the home manager manual it'll be link linked down in the description below and there are actually multiple different ways of installing home manager the way I prefer to have it set up is using the Standalone installation but there's also the Nyx OS module installation essentially the difference between them is the Standalone installation is completely managed by the user accounts and there is a clear separation between the system configuration and the user configuration the system configuration will be in our configuration.nix from last time and the user level configuration will be in the home. NX file one of the advantages to this is that you don't actually require root to get this up and running so setting up your configuration this way is technically a little more portable because you could take your home manager configuration to a system that you don't have admin privileges on the nyos module setup on the other hand is slightly different instead of separating the user level config and the system level config they're actually in the same file they're both included in the configuration.nix file and so for this one you sort of have to have root privileges and so for this one you sort of have to have root privileges but the advantage to this is that you can control all of the dot files of multiple users on the entire system at once both of these will work for a single user system if you're like me and you think it's cleaner to have the system level and user level stuff separated I recommend doing the Standalone installation but if you're going to be using this to manage a computer that multiple people are using and you want to manage their dot files go ahead and use the n X module setup cuz that is definitely Superior in that use case since I use the Standalone installation this is the one we're going to go through in this video though later on I will make a nixos module home manager setup video if you guys want to see that so here we are we can click the instructions here and here they are so we're going to run these inside of our VM from last time okay so here we are again back in the VM I got the home manager manual here we're going to Standalone installation 1.1 the first decision you have to make is whether or not you're on the unstable or latest stable Channel if you're unstable like me go ahead and grab the top two commands and if you're running the latest stable grab the bottom two I actually think that this VM is running the stable channel so we're going to just grab these two put those into your terminal hit enter and what this will do is pull the home manager channel into your system system but it does not yet actually install home manager as a command in order to get home manager as a command we need to install it that'll be this Command right here now at this step there's a common error where it'll just say something like home manager is not found or Source not found if you see that error just go ahead and log out so do a full log out log back in and try it again it should fix it at that point there's sometimes just an error with like the environment variables and the user environment and stuff like that and Rel logging in will fix the issue once it finishes it should hopefully say starting home manager activation creating profile generation one and all that good stuff so if you see something like this it means that the home man manager install was successful now as an astute Observer you may be wondering wait uh isn't nixos like supposed to be declarative why are we running commands to install our packages I I thought we should be like putting the thing putting it into the configuration file and then switching well what happens with home manager is home manager declaratively manages itself and so you have to bootstrap it into the system before it is is fully declarative from here though the basic way of interacting with home manager is now declarative we can go Toc config slome manager and you should see a home. ni file and if you open this up and look at it you'll notice it Bears a resemblance to the configuration.nix file but now we have different sets of options like home. user username home. home directory and a few more things like home. packages if you want to have packages that are only available to your user account and not systemwide you could add them in here into this home. packages block just like the system packages block from configuration.nix now to show you real quick a basic configuration I'm just going to add the hello package to the home. packages block here it's already there you just need to uncomment it you can then save the file and then in order to switch into this new configuration and have access to the hello program which we do not have that right now there's a command similar to the nyos rebuild command but instead it's the home manager command so the command is just home- manager switch and when you do this it will read the home. nck file figure out what it needs to change and in this case it was just installing the hello program so now we have the hello program which is super awesome before we get too indepth into this I want to show you how to incorporate this home. NX file into the do files directory that we started last time so essentially what we're going to do is copy the home. Nix file that we just looked at into the do files directory so now everything is all in one place and from here if we want to make this work with our flake we're going to have to make a few edits to the flake switching back real quick into my host system I'm going to edit the flake. N inside of my fully set up emac config again so that we can see things just a little bit nicer so here it is here is our flake from from last time so in order to incorporate home manager into the flake we're going to need to add home manager as an input so home manager of course has a URL just like NYX packages does in this case it's going to be GitHub NYX Community Home manager and then we're using release-- 23.0 5 that is the branch if you're using unstable NYX packages this would just be the master Branch but home manager also takes in NYX packages as an input so if the version of Nyx packages right here is different from the version of Nyx packages that home manager is using we're going to have some problems so in order to fix that we have another line where it is hom manager. inputs. NX packages. follows equals NYX packages so what this says is make sure that the versions of Nyx packages that are being ref referenced in both of these are the exact same that will be it for the inputs block but now for the outputs Block in the outputs block we have this nice handy function here that is telling us how to build the Nyx OS system configuration but now we need to add another part of this that declares the home configurations in order to do this we're going to need to pass home manager as an input here because it needs home manager in order to build the home configuration and then we're going to make another section similar to Nyx OS configurations but in this case it's home configurations so right after the block that defines our nyos configurations we're going to make another block for home configurations and the structure for this is going to be very similar to what is happening in the Nyx OS configurations block so then to see this a little bit better I'm going to open up this view on the side here so you can see the hierarchy and one of the things that's really cool is that the structure of this home configurations block is going to be very similar to the structure of the nixos configurations block so we can actually copy all of this and just make some modifications in here so if you you can sort of see on the side they're going to have a similar structure but we're going to be modifying what these actual contents are so in the nyos configuration we wanted to define the configuration for the system so we used the host name of the system NYX os- tututorial but since this is configuration for the user we want to Define it for the particular user so so the default method of setting this up is just giving the name of your user in this case I have it as Libre Phoenix this configuration is not supposed to be a nyos system it's supposed to be a home manager configuration it's supposed to be a set of dot files that get activated on the system so we can't use the nyos system function anymore instead the function to use is right here hom manager. li. hom manager configuration now the home manager configuration has modules just like the system does but in this case the module is no longer the configuration a.n it is now the home. ni one more thing we got to do before this home manager configuration function works is change this system argument which it actually doesn't take as an argument into the package set which is what it needs in order to run the common way of doing this is by declaring packages or pkgs for short in the let binding and setting it to Nyx package P ages. Legacy packages Dot and then whatever the architecture type is in quotes So in this case it's going to be x86 64- Linux then in order for home manager configuration the function to know about that we can put in inherit packages what the inherit thing does is it takes whatever the variable is declared as in the let binding and passes that as an argument to the function or into wherever it is and so then one thing you probably noticing that might be driving you a bit insane is that we actually reference the architecture type twice here and here and what is perfect for abstracting out multiple Declarations of that another variable so to make this just a little bit more optimized we can actually declare the system architecture up here as system and set that to whatever architecture you're using and then instead of packages equals all of this at the end we're going to change this to dollar sign squiggly brackets and then system it's kind of like bash where the dollar sign and squiggly brackets can be used to expand whatever the variable means and then this should work and bonus points if you notice this early we can also now pass the system in to the nixos system function as an inherit by using inherit system and all of that should work nicely now the Declaration for the system architecture is just in one place which is very beautiful so assuming I did not forget any semicolons this should now be a functioning flake config with both the nyos configuration and the home manager configuration in it so then how do we work with this in the actual system well if we go back to the VM here and navigate back to the files directory we have everything together here the way we actually synchronize our configuration now now that we have the flake set up will be similar to how we changed the nyos rebuild command and that we're just going to run home manager switch d-lake and then pass in the directory and looks like I got an error here uh permission denied permission denied on the flake. loock file um yeah I have no idea why the flake. loock file is owned by root but I guess we can just fix that there okay and now we'll run that command again you should see some sort of output like this where it goes ahead and reinstalls stuff according to the actual flake. loock file and then all the versions of all the packages for both the system and the home manager configuration will be tied to the flake. loock file and whenever it decides to finish here we're good so there we go at this point we have a do files directory the system configuration is in it the user configuration is in it just as a quick recap if you're using flakes like me to update your system you can navigate to your do files directory or whatever directory you have all these in and run NYX flake update what this will do is go ahead and update the flake. loock file so any subsequent switches will be using updated packages to update the system you'll run pseudo Nix os- rebuild switch d-lake and then dot for the actual directory pound sign and then the name of the configuration if your configuration name is different from your host name and then it's a similar story for home manager home manager switch d-lake dot followed with a pound sign and the name of whatever the home manager configuration is if it's not the name of your user account okay so from here how do we get home manager to actually do useful stuff for us well this is going to involve us exploring the thousands and thousands of options that are out there for various programs and embedding them into the home. N we're going to go over bash and zsh as an example because probably everyone will want to be configuring their shell in some capacity and it's a very good example of how this configuring in the home. ni file actually does work so to do this you can open up the home. Nix file I'm going to open it up on my post system again inside my emac and there we are from here you'll also want to have my Nix os.com opened up on the as side because it's a very useful tool for exploring the kinds of configuration options we can now mess with so starting with bash what sort of things can we do to configure bash if you open up my nyos and then just search bash you will get a ton of different things but we can narrow this down a little bit further since we're concerned with home manager we can add a space home manager and then we get all the home manager options for bash so you can look through through these there's tons and tons of them but the most important thing to do if you want to have home manager manage any of your configurations is make sure that you set enable to true this one for example here programs. bash. enable if you set this to true then your bash RC and related bash files will be created by home manager as those Sim links that we were looking at earlier so we can start off by adding that into our config configuration wherever we would like I'll put it right over here so it's programs. bash. enable equals true with this any other options that we configure in the home. ni related to bash will then be reflected in The autogenerated Bash RC something that everyone should have in their bash RC are aliases so how do we get aliases in bash well if we search for aliases we're going to find programs. bash. shell aliases and if you look at this you'll see it is an attribute set of strings meaning it's going to be set to some squiggly brackets with a bunch of things set equal to each other so it's not necessarily the same syntax as you would see in a bash RC where it's actually you know Alias LL equals quots ls- L it's a slightly different syntax but this is the Nyx configuration syntax which makes it really nice so we could go ahead here and grab this configuration and just plug it into programs. bash. shell aliases I believe it was there we go making sure not to forget a semicolon maybe we want to format it a little bit nicer here and so then again as you're seeing here on the side this forms this hierarchy again so we have B enable is set to true and there's other property shell aliases and then within that there's another hierarchy which is really really cool and as we learned last time you could rewrite this in a slightly different way instead of repeating programs. bash twice we could instead write it like this programs. bash equals and then we have our brackets enable equals true and then shell aliases equals all of this fun stuff right here and those two things are functionally equivalent the dot just means go down one level in the hierarchy that we see over here on the right side now if we go back into to the VM so now with that updated bash configuration in the home. ni we could switch into this new configuration home manager switch d-lake and then passing in our directory and this works nicely if we navigate out and we cat the bashrc there's a bunch of other stuff in here but you will see it added in those two aliases and now if we run one of those aliases will get to see that the bash RC is in fact a Sim link linking to this thing in the Nyx store pretty awesome zsh is configured similarly if you want to use zsh you can just search zsh home manager and then you'll get all of the options for zsh and you can explore these as you like but some of these are similar enough to The Bash option that we could honestly just take the configuration from bash here copy it and just replace this with zsh go back into our VM switch into the new configuration and now it's doing something similar for zsh now again one of the things you'll notice here is that we're duplicating our definition of shell aliases they're the exact same thing for both bash and zsh in this example so if we wanted to we could abstract these out into a variable by going up to the top and using another let binding let bindings are used to pass in variables so we could say let my aliases equal and then we'll grab the definition here like so and then say in let my aliases equal all of this in this whole block here all we would have to do then is change both of these shell aliases equals to say my aliases and I think something went wrong with some of the squiggly brackets here there we go so with that then we can switch into the new configuration again and everything works like expected quick tip then on the side here if you want to switch your default shell from bash to something like zsh that is a system level configuration so that configuration so that configuration is not going to be in home. Nix but rather in configuration.nix and the relevant configuration looks something like this so environment. shells equals with packages and then whatever shells you want on the system bash zsh and fish or just one of them if you want the default shell whichever one you want zsh bash or fish and then just making sure to enable the one that you have selected as as the default shell and you'd be good to go from here on out there are lots and lots of options here that you can mess around with to search for options for a particular package I recommend just searching for the package say for example vim and along with searching home manager if you're trying to configure a user level dot file or NYX packages SL option if you're looking for a configuration that would be system level anything that's marked as NYX packages option would be in the configuration.nix and anything that is in home manager/ option would of course go in the home. Nix file now if you are a nerd like me and you have tons and tons of dot files for various things on your system it is a very daunting task to try and migrate all of those dot files into this home manager setup so of course if you're looking at migrating to home manager you can take it slow and migrate one thing at a time putting in the normal dot files in their normal places without home manager will still work totally fine but there is also one more trick that home manager has up its sleeve that allows very quick migration from a normal configuration file into home manager and that is with the home. file option which is a set of files to link into the user home there's two main ways of using this and this is again back in the home. Nix file the first way of using the home. file property is by just putting the contents of the file inside of Home manager and you do this by writing home home. file Dot and then in quotes the path to the actual file so if I was going to put in my hyperland config this would be Doc config hyperhyper land.com and then text equals we can then use these sets of double single quotes and between those single quotes paste in the entire contents of the config what this says is write this text into thec config hyperhyper land.com file as a siml file just like we saw in the bash RC now if you don't want your home. ni file to get absurdly large very quickly there's another method of doing this where instead of passing it the actual text we pass the source and the source would be a path to the actual config file so we could take an existing hyperland docon file or whatever configuration file once we have it available in the do files directory we can just Source it like this and that will work similarly one last thing I want to mention here before we wrap up is what to do if you end up breaking something because NYX OS and Nyx are supposed to allow you to roll back but home manager roll backs are not necessarily intuitive but they are pretty easy so in order to roll back into a previous configuration you start by running home manager generations and what this will do is output a list list of all of the generations you have previously switched into and they should be in Reverse chronological order with the most recent one being at the top so once you figured out which generation you want to roll back to all you have to do is copy the path to the Nick store for that generation and add slash activate and run that activate is a script that is in every single one of these generations and it is the activation script it is what sets up the system to have all the dot files and Sim links be in their correct places so I hope you learned something I hope that this was a good entry point into home manager next time we're going to be looking at how we can expand our configuration to be much more modular and after that I'll be taking requests for tutorials on how to configure specific applications maybe like emac or Neo Vim or Kling window managers or hyperland or whatever if there's a particular setup that you want me to go over how to get a basic configuration running in NYX OS and with home manager let me know down in the comments below so if you like the video please leave a like comment and subscribe if you dislike the video please leave a dislike and let me know what you disliked about the video video that's all for today and I hope you have a great rest of your day

Channel: LibrePhoenix

Views: 31,903

Keywords: linux, foss, free software, open source, oss, open source software, nix, nixos, dotfiles, configuration, nixos configuration, config, nixos config, nixos dotfiles, tutorial, flake, nixos flake, flakes, nixos flakes, nixos tutorial, flake tutorial, flakes tutorial, home manager, home-manager, home manager flake, home-manager flake, home manager nixos, home-manager nixos, home manager nix, home-manager nix

Id: IiyBeR-Guqw

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023