Ultimate NixOS Guide | Flakes | Home-manager

NYX is an amazing Linux distribution focusing on simple declarative configurations automic upgrades easy roll backs and unmatched reproducibility and this is the ultimate nyos guide by the end of which you will learn how to install nyos how to edit and upgrade NYX declaratively what flakes are and how to use them what is and how to use home manager and finally simple ways to structure your NYX files for ease of configuration and use on multiple machines so without further Ado let's begin when you use a traditional operating system you typically Auto remove features by installing packages modifying configuration files or enabling services this method of system configuration is known as the imperative approach in contrast to Nyx 's declarative approach on nyos everything can and should be declared in special NYX files which are then used to rebuild your system as if you were installing it from scratch the closest analogy I can think of is declaring note packages in package.json as opposed to having a script that imperatively installs all packages one by one script on the left is literally laughable because even though the result looks similar it will be much harder to reproduce modify or analyze declarative approach also allows you to easily share one configuration among multiple machines which means that a simple git pull command is all you need to deploy your existing configuration to a brand new machine worried about breaking important parts of your system when updating nyos has got you covered each time you rebuild your configuration a fresh version of nyos is created containing only the components you have declared all previous versions remain on your drive until you explicitly delete them this allows you to revert back to the last version fix any issues yourself or simply wait for them to resolve on their own thanks to the popular calamari installer getting NX is just as easy as any other Linux drro select the correct region keyboard layout username and password all the usual stuff you can also immediately choose one of the various desktop environments which will only slightly affect your initial configuration file I will choose gome but you can choose whichever one you prefer make sure to enable swap file and tick the unfree software option during the final step the installation might get stuck at exactly 46% but don't worry about it just wait a little bit reboot your computer and if your desktop environment loads correctly you have successfully created the first iteration of your system and from now on you will be able to roll back to it in case anything goes wrong so where is that fancy configuration file you keep hearing about by default it is located in/ Etsy n/c configuration.nix navigate to it by running cd/ et/ nixos or opening this directory in a graphical file manager you will also see a hardware configuration file there but you almost never want to modify it open the configuration file with pseudo edit and you will see a bunch of options defined in a special NYX syntax at this point you can think of it as not much different from Json but if you have any trouble understanding it throughout the guide make sure to to check out Nick's language video in the link in the description the first thing you usually want to do on a fresh system is install software you are already familiar with scroll down to the line that says environment. system packages and let's add something there if you want to know the names of available packages navigate to search. n.org website where you can choose any of the 80,000 available packages NYX packages is currently the largest software repository in the world and it absolutely dwarves all other repos both in terms of number of packages and number of fresh packages closely followed only by the mighty a in addition to packages default nio configuration file also includes a bunch of options depending on what you choose during installation the ones I got here include enabling gome cup sprting service pipe wire and some other essential desktop options obviously you cannot fit everything here so to discover new ones rightman configuration. n and then use SL key to search for your desired options I'll search for Bluetooth and see that hardware. bluetooth. enable is the option I need and judging by the Boolean type and default false value I can assume that all I need to do is set this option to true in the configuration if you cannot find something here feel free to use nyxi or Google NS has been around for more than 20 years already so 99% of your use cases should already be covered with options now use Pudo NX rebuild switch command to rebuild your system and switch to the newest version we can immediately use Vim connect devices with Bluetooth and the bootloader will Now display two different system versions to choose from but wait doesen storing two slightly different versions of the system take a lot of storage and the answer is of course not because NYX package manager stores everything in a magical place called NYX store it is located under /n/ store directory and every single package you install is going to be there try to locate any binary with which command and you will see that it is located in the bin folder of one of these Nick store directories this storage mechanism is what allows nyos to reuse packages between multiple system versions each time you rebuild your configuration your system's blueprint is created in the Nyx store as just another regular package and it simply holds references to other regular packages from the store on each startup nixos executes activation script from this blueprint to populate your root directory based on the options from the configuration file that was used to create it therefore the only thing that matters in terms of dis space is amount of packages you install across all present rebuilds it's not uncommon to have dozens or even hundreds of these system versions at once but if you want to keep things clear you can use pseudo nyxo rebuild test to rebuild your system activate it but don't add it to the boot loader even then you still want to clean up your storage once in a while and you can do that by running pseudo NYX collect garbage delete older than and 15 days for example it will remove all system versions older than 15 days as well as all packages that are no longer used by new generations basic system configuration is covered but what about actually updating packages this is the toughest but definitely the most important part of the video what many beginners do not realize is that Nyo rebuild does not update any packages let me explain NYX packages the giant repository of well NYX packages is hosted on GitHub it's split into many different branches but the most important ones are Upstream unstable and the latest stable by default when you install nyos your system gets pinned to the latest commit in the stable Branch all packages you install and all NX options you apply are then taken from it this commit is called a channel and it stays the same until you explicitly update to a newer commit you might already see a problem with such approach if you were to share your configuration with another person there is no guarantee that their pinned commit will be the same they might be on an unstable Branch or a very old commit that might not even include the options that you are using yet this is where NYX flakes coming into play they are basically a special system for managing your NY code dependencies in a declarative way in a moment we will create a file that explicitly lists your preferred NX packages Branch as a dependency and Flake system will then automatically create a lock file to keep track of its updates like in any other modern package manager NYX flake update command can then be used to update all flake dependencies this way our flake configuration won't be dependent on a special systems Channel making it TR reproducible and reliable to begin using flakes you want to open your nyxo configuration and add this line anywhere you want NYX flakes are considered an experimental feature right now but they are already widely adopted by the community so there is literally no point in not using them rebuild your system and you now have access to latest and greatest NYX commands next CD into /c/ nios and run this command to see a fl. n file appear in this directory open it with your preferred editor and you will see a bunch of Nyx code it might seem dting at first but don't worry like I mentioned before input set at the top defines sources that our flake needs to fetch and outputs holds chunks of Nyx code that can be evaluated after fetching all inputs the only source we have here is regular NYX packages from the unstable branch and the only output is this default NY configuration which references configuration. n module from the same directory you don't have to modify this file at all because everything is already done rebuild your system with a special-- flake argument which takes a path to your flakes Parent Directory wait for it to finish and take a look at the current directory with ls command again you will see flake. loock file appear confirming your undeniable success that is of course not the only advantage of using flakes because like I've said earlier inputs Define multiple sources that your flake needs to fetch which allows us to fetch other community flakes just like one of the most popular ones home manager home manager provides us with a very nice NYX module but before we can import it let's talk about what modules are modules are chunks of Nyx code that extend your configuration by setting options or providing new ones they usually look something like this which is equivalent to this piece of pseudo code that I wrote basically functions that take some arguments and return dictionaries with options if it looks familiar that is because your configuration.nix and Hardware configuration. n are both nyos modules configuration.nix here Imports Hardware configuration. N and is itself imported in our flake notice that Hardware configuration seems to get more arguments at the first glance but that is only because all other ones are hidden behind this amazing triple dot syntax making your own module with custom options is also really simple create a new NY file import it and fill it with whatever you want I'll make a module that defines my systems primary user and sets its shell to zsh wbp those options with config key and Define an option set above it now we can add custom options at the top and refer to them in config the first option will be used to toggle our module and the second one will determine our user's name these options can now be used in any other module so let's call them in our main configuration as you can see config basically refers to the options generally set in your configuration which allows you to set options based on other options to make our custom module cleaner we can also make an alas for config do main user at the top and put both of our options on under the same set every single module you import has access to options defined in all other modules so what we want to do now is download home manager module and import it anywhere so we can use its options to tell your flake that it needs to download home manager we want to add it to the inputs at the top and also optionally make home manager all NYX packages follow your NYX packages so you don't have to download two different versions of Nyx packages we can now import home manager module into our NX siiz configuration just by adding it to modules like I've said earlier it doesn't matter where we import our modules but the thing is we are going to be using options from this one in configuration. NX so let's import it there I've included this extra special ARS parameter in the config evaluating function and what it does is take all inputs of our flake and passes it to parameters of every single module meaning we can go to our configuration. n file bring the inputs parameter to the scope and import the module from the inputs now we have access to home manager and its modules option but what exactly does it do as the name suggests it provides us with a way to declaratively configure your home directory or more specifically program config files that are stored there yes you can already Define system settings and services but what if you could also have a universal configuration file for all your user programs like zsh neovim git or even your favorite tiling Window Manager the NX module we imported provides us with an option called home manager which lets us Define users that will have this special home configuration for most people it's just going to be their default user so write your primary user name here and import the home. N file from the same directory home. n will serve as an entry point to our home configuration just like configuration. n for nyos we do not have this file yet so to generate it around this command which you can find in the link in the description rebuild your system and you should now have a manome configuration. n command available in your terminal just like man configuration. n this command will show you all available options the only difference is they must be set in home. N or any of the modules that it Imports home manager modules follow the exact same structure as nixos modules but have slightly different options allowing you to create files with some content relatively linking files from the config to home directory and most importantly configuring your favorite programs with NYX the coolest part is home manager also works on any other drro or even maos so migrating your do files to home manager won't forever bind you to Nix with the way we installed it home manager will get rebuilt as part of your system on every nyos rebuil so you don't even have to run any additional commands we have already covered a lot of things but structuring your configuration is what differentiates a good configuration from the bad one here is the project structure that we have currently let's modify it a bit to make it much easier to navigate and extend we can start by creating a host directory which will contain a directory for every machine that we want to manage with our NYX project our first host is the Cur one so let's create a default directory for it and put these three files there don't forget to change relative pass pointing to it in the flake and we can now add new host simply by making new directories and defining configurations in the flake choosing which one you want to use for rebuilding is simply a matter of changing the last part of the flake command currently this setup does not reuse any code between configurations which makes them hard to maintain and synchronize to fix this issue let's also create a modules directory which will contain NX and home manager modules by splitting your configurations into smaller files you ensure that the only thing you need to do on a new machine is to choose the modules you need just like at a buffet these modules could be used to configure specific programs bigger parts of your system or even import other smaller modules lastly because we are using flakes we don't really have to store our configuration in /y/ NX anymore so you can move it anywhere you want like your home directory for example NX is a very deep rabbit hole and there is much much more to it than it might initially seem I recommend you to check out some more videos about it on my channel and also this cool video by a yoga Master which covers many additional steps you can take to really learn nixos everything you saw in this video can be found in the link in the description and now I would like to thank the sponsors of this video specifically Hoskin Linux rocks be easy not not uni kinaku lassus Thomas Thomas Brown aing B Ponder hening ker Cameron Vio friend Oakley cord dude 9501 and also the people who supported this channel before this video is quite big because it took much more time to make than usual but don't worry making smaller 4 to 6 Minute videos is still my priority as usual don't forget to check out our Discord server leave a like or a comment if you enjoy this video or subscribe if you are feeling extra generous thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Vimjoyer

Views: 91,438

Keywords: nix, linux, module, install, home-manager, hyprland, nixos, ultimate, guide, tutorial

Id: a67Sv4Mbxmc

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2023