Hi John,
I guess the reason you are not receiving many answers is that your
question highlights some misconceptions, and some design issues with nix.
There does not exist any declarative configuration file for user
environments. /etc/nixos/configuration.nix is amazing, but has not been
parted to user environments. Installing user packages is done with
nix-env, in an imperative fashion, and updates are based on packages
names (nix-env -u) as explained on the [wiki]. Please see the discussion
on [GitHub](1) about that precise topic.
To get declarative user environments, you can look at the pull-request
for [NixUP] (nix user profiles), or use a trick to manage packages
declaratively in a custom environment. The [wiki] has such an example. I
personally maintain a [~/.nixpkgs/packages.nix] that I edit, install and
activate with the following one-liner. The command replaces all the
installed packages with the given ones (-ir). I could alias it to
nixuser-rebuild ;-).
vim ~/.nixpkgs/packages.nix && nix-env -f ~/.nixpkgs/packages.nix
-ir -Qk && i3-msg restart
NixUP and/or the coming update to nix (1.12) /should/ make this
management easier.
I hope this makes it clearer!
Regards,
-- Layus.
[NixUP]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/9250
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/1750
[wiki]:
https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_keep_multiple_packages_up_to_date_at_once
[~/nixpkgs/packages.nix]:
https://gist.github.com/layus/427356ab4e7f46565d984686a311ca91#file-packages-nix
On 03/05/17 08:29, John Ramsden wrote:
I've been looking for some information about how exactly the
$HOME/.nixpkgs/config.nix file works. How exactly is it intended to be
used? Up until now I've been managing my entire system from
/etc/nixos, but it would be nice to have a place where I can add
something that happens only to a single user. For example, setting up
dotfiles, or use our services. Can the config.nix file be used for
that? Is it effectively a /etc/nixos/configuration.nix that is
intended to be used for a single user?
I have found little bits of information about it here and there, for
example in the nix pills. but nothing that really explains what it is
used for in detail. Could someone point me where I can find this
information?
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