This is one way of managing your user profile declaratively.
Alternatives include:
- an attrset-based
nix-env
-based environment, installed usingnix-env -ir
rather thannix-env --set
. LnL has an overlay which shows a way of doing this. - home-manager, which provides NixOS-like config for your
$HOME
Note that this is incompatible with regular imperative use of nix-env
, e.g. nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hello
. It has the advantage of allowing the installation of multiple outputs of the same package much better than nix-env
's builtin profile builder does.
I personally currently use home-manager.
- buildEnv ✔️
- buildEnv takes responsibility for the entire user profile, meaning that nix's builtin env builder cannot modify it
- attrset ❌
- the attrset approach leaves building the profile up to
nix-env
, which allows adding packages ad-hoc (though they will be removed on the next profile build) usingnix-env -i
- the attrset approach leaves building the profile up to
- home-manager ❌
- home-manager installs a single
buildEnv
into the user profile, remaining compatible with imperative/impurenix-env
- home-manager installs a single
- buildEnv ❌
- attrset ❌
- home-manager ✔️
- buildEnv ❌
- attrset ❌
- home-manager ✔️
- buildEnv ✔️
- attrset ❌
- home-manager ❓
Okay, this is what I ended up going with:
If you place the file in the location above it will be automatically used if no other expression is listed, so you can just do
nix-env --set
. IMO this is much simpler. You need to includenix
in paths or else you'll destroy your profile... neither this nor the overlay gist mention this which surprises me, maybe I got something wrong.