A rebuild script that commits on a successful build

configuration.nix

{
  config,
  pkgs,
  options,
  ...
}: let
  hostname = "oatman-pc"; # to alllow per-machine config
in {
  networking.hostName = hostname;

  imports = [
    /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix
    (/home/oatman/dotfiles/nixos + "/${hostname}.nix")
  ];
}

nixos-rebuild.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# I believe there are a few ways to do this:
#
#    1. My current way, using a minimal /etc/nixos/configuration.nix that just imports my config from my home directory (see it in the gist)
#    2. Symlinking to your own configuration.nix in your home directory (I think I tried and abandoned this and links made relative paths weird)
#    3. My new favourite way: as @clot27 says, you can provide nixos-rebuild with a path to the config, allowing it to be entirely inside your dotfies, with zero bootstrapping of files required.
#       `nixos-rebuild switch -I nixos-config=path/to/configuration.nix`
#    4. If you uses a flake as your primary config, you can specify a path to `configuration.nix` in it and then `nixos-rebuild switch —flake` path/to/directory
# As I hope was clear from the video, I am new to nixos, and there may be other, better, options, in which case I'd love to know them! (I'll update the gist if so)

# A rebuild script that commits on a successful build
set -e

# Edit your config
$EDITOR configuration.nix

# cd to your config dir
pushd ~/dotfiles/nixos/

# Early return if no changes were detected (thanks @singiamtel!)
if git diff --quiet '*.nix'; then
    echo "No changes detected, exiting."
    popd
    exit 0
fi

# Autoformat your nix files
alejandra . &>/dev/null \
  || ( alejandra . ; echo "formatting failed!" && exit 1)

# Shows your changes
git diff -U0 '*.nix'

echo "NixOS Rebuilding..."

# Rebuild, output simplified errors, log trackebacks
sudo nixos-rebuild switch &>nixos-switch.log || (cat nixos-switch.log | grep --color error && exit 1)

# Get current generation metadata
current=$(nixos-rebuild list-generations | grep current)

# Commit all changes witih the generation metadata
git commit -am "$current"

# Back to where you were
popd

# Notify all OK!
notify-send -e "NixOS Rebuilt OK!" --icon=software-update-available

So, I tried to make a flake free configuration and arrived at conclusion flakes makes it far easier to deal with dependencies to other nix projects like home-manager or nixvim.

As far as I know you use Nix to just configure your computer, your dotfiles are managed outside of Nix. If you ever decide to change from this paradigm, you might want to give flakes another chance.

See you later Tris.

Yeah, I actually abandoned not having flakes enabled after a day - so many tools assume you've got a flakes system. The rust flake works very well, for instance. I'm down to use it for links to these other projects - but not core system stuff.

I'm sad though: My dream of unattended upgrades seems dead. By design, flakes don't update their lockfile without user input, right?
The difference between me and many nix folks is that I don't care about reproducibility. I care about stability and bleeding-edge features. Lucky for me, Nixos gives me that!

I did indeed trynixvim for a while, but lazynvim is turnkey, so I'm simply using that. Home Assistant is fine, but I don't think it makes sense for my low-stress life. I want my config to instantly change when I change a config file, not requiring a hm switch - an symlinks work great for that!
Using GNU Stow I run stow . on my dotfiles directory, and with no config, everything's symlinked into my home directory. I get config rollback with git, and given that neither HM or Stow is linked to my nixos system generations... feels like I'm not missing anything?

I'm sad though: My dream of unattended upgrades seems dead. By design, flakes don't update their lockfile without user input, right? The difference between me and many nix folks is that I don't care about reproducibility. I care about stability and bleeding-edge features. Lucky for me, Nixos gives me that!

Ditto on the reproducability (I want reproducability in my package set and configs but versions are unimportant to me). It's not quite "unattended", but you could add a nix flake update line into your rebuild script and update lock files that way

Very good point. I could perhaps run that on a cron?