Every time you rebuild the configuration, you create a new “generation” of configuration that you can roll back to just as easily: As upgrades happen and old generations pile up, this may end up taking up a lot of unwanted disk (and boot menu) space.

Superficial aesthetics aside, thanks for the article, I’ve been keeping an eye on NixOS for a while now. This is nowhere near enough to boot an entire system, but is good enough for describing the base layout of a basic LXC image. packages with /etc/ subdirectories. How is that how NPM works? Earlier, I mentioned that Nix is a functional package manager.

The similarity is almost creepy. Looking at its contents with ls, we see this: For a more complicated package, let’s look at the build directions of the website you are reading right now: Breaking it down, we see some similarities to the gruvbox-css package from above, but there’s a few more interesting lines I want to point out: My website uses a pinned or fixed version of nixpkgs. I think the real reason why the team has “chosen” this approach is because it’s the easiest path, and it’s now been rationalized as an intentional design decision. xserver options unset as xrandr can detect the appropriate monitor resolution for us. If you want to upgrade your entire system: This tells nixos-rebuild to upgrade the package channels, use those to create a new base system description, switch the running system to it and start/restart/stop any services that were added/upgraded/removed during the upgrade. You can add other inputs to this environment if you need to, but for now it works as-is. Let’s pick an instance graphviz from before and install it using nix-env: And now let’s see where the dot tool from graphviz is installed to: This lets you install tools into the system-level Nix store without affecting other user’s environments, even if they depend on a different version of graphviz.

Also, the home-manager tool does not explicitly support rollbacks at the moment so if your home directory gets messed up you'll have to fix it yourself.

I feel like you wrote the reply I wrote almost exactly with a few minor differences. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear. For example, a server installation of graphviz wouldn’t need X windows support. Hence I decided to not use networking.wireless, with the following as part of my configuration.nix file: NixOS machines are configured using a configuration.nix file that contains the following kinds of settings: At a high level, machines are configured by setting options like this: This would specify a simple NixOS machine with the hostname example-for-blog and with wget and vim installed. It’s hard to go back. system configuration dependent in a state that is no longer distributions, all the system configuration files for Xorg (modules that define filesystem hierarchy that included the appropriate Xorg modules. 11. that can be set in the configuration.nix file.

Besides, If the goal is truly to keep all the packages constantly updated without any human oversight and *only* offer one version (i.e., the latest version) of the package, which is what people claimed when I asked, then there are better ways to do this than the ad-hoc approach of updating everything whenever a maintainer decides to update a package. combination of standard shell login and xinit to boot into a window manager. If you’re a program depending on other packages in a collection, you expect your dependencies to not change from under you. discovered that a similar effect could be achieved by disabling I tried that and it work seamlessly, however I lose the ability to use my desktop manager's network manager integration. environment altogether and keep things light. more-or-less mapped to the setup of one-or-more systemd services. I’m going to attempt to explain a lot of the guiding principles behind Nix and NixOS and how they fit into how I use NixOS on my desktop. Surely they should move on to Haskell or something with more popularity by this point. and launch correctly! 5 …

The network section in the Nixos manual explains how one can use network manager and networking.wireless together.

Through this experience and community feedback, I learned a few additional Yet that’s essentially what Nixpkgs’ blessed mechanism for updating or adding a new NPM package to the repo does, it causes every other NPM package exposed through Nixpkgs to update. CC BY-SA. are not available in a central directory. is necessary, it is good practice to leave the resolution parameter in the

Whether to symlink the X server configuration under /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It takes in the Go package path, list of dependencies and if the resulting package is allowed to depend on the Go compiler or not.

Hey @Zimmi48 No, I'm not in NixOs, but I thought the question is anyway related and people knowing about NixOs could bring some light. development workflow has greatly benefited from using nix shell in conjunction Internally, every one of these options will be fed into auto-generated Nix packages that will describe the system configuration bit by bit. Does any of you use Pantheon with NixOS?

Essentially, they let you say “everything in this object should be put into scope”. That’s basically how NPM works.

NPM, if I don’t like the JS ecosystem’s norms because Nix is merely replicating the JS ecosystem’s norms, that’s what I understood. startx Each of these things builds on top of eachother to make the base platform that I built my desktop environment on. The first line of the output is the attribute. When we run this through Nix withnix-build, we get output that looks something like this: And /nix/store/ng5qnhwyrk9zaidjv00arhx787r0412s-gruvbox-css is the output package. For example, let’s look for graphviz, a popular diagramming software: There are several results here! #47773) to avoid pollution of the By enabling the option, our environment still polluted, but only with the Xorg GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. I’ll give you a small example. I’m hearing more and more people talk about NixOS lately, and I’ve been wondering why.

Home Manager targets NixOS unstable and NixOS version 20.03 (the current stable version), it may or may not work on other Linux distributions and NixOS versions. This means that our package builds can build C/C++ programs, copy files to the output, and extract downloaded source files by default. It is a human process for a very good reason.

reading, however, chances are you would like to avoid using a bloated desktop Nix includes a few tools that help you find, install, upgrade and remove packages as well as nix-build to build new ones. runner, for dedicated runners; or most importantly in our case, Unfortunately, although it works, it ends up symlinking the contents of other

For many, this may just as well be exactly what they want/need. Now because NixOS typically uses systemd to start X, unlike other Linux modules, allowing xinit to read the configuration from the expected directory This allows you to leave the older versions of a package laying around so you can roll back to them if you need to. explaining them without any context, I thought it would be more interesting to This line will make the build fail if Nix is using any Go version less than 1.13. What is a Package?

Friends on IRC and Discord had been trying to get me to use it for years, and I was really impressed with a simple setup that I had in a virtual machine. How "batteries included" is the Pantheon Desktop on NixOS? If Ansible or other tools like it let you customize an existing Linux distribution to meet your needs, NixOS allows you to craft your own Linux distribution around your needs. filesystem with extraneous symlinks. This can be achieved using a For more kinds of packages that you can build, see the Languages and Frameworks chapter of the nixpkgs documentation.

are not already familiar with it. It’s an AMAZING way to manage a system, and once you go declarative/functional, you’ll never want to go back. I also don’t totally understand why they continue to use the obscure Nix language, which was part of Dostra’s Ph.D. thesis. Posted by 4 months ago. Not only have you installed Linux, but you’ve installed a Linux distribution customized to meet your exact needs. I assume that’s what you meant? At this point, NixOS is up and running, with all the software you need and the KDE Plasma 5 desktop interface.

Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress, How to Manage Database Timeouts and Cancellations in Go, Why for and range behave differently depending on the size of the element, build directions of the website you are reading right now, Gammo – A pure-Ruby HTML5-compliant parser, Ask HN: What's the fastest tool for basic CRUD, Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now Open Source and included with Amazon Linux 2. Site content under I would read this article even if it didn’t interest me!

NixOS’ packages contain NPM packages.

already filled-out some sane settings for the xserver. With a single, key configuration option, we were able to bend NixOS in a way

Many (if not most) of them also don’t seem to be native English speakers, which doesn’t help the matter.

It’s really, really bad. When the parts were almost in, I had decided to really start digging into NixOS. nixos-rebuild is the tool that helps you commit configuration changes to the system as well as roll them back. So I decided to jump head-first down that rabbit hole, and I’m honestly really glad I did. it throws you into the desktop environment. So in March (just before the situation started) I ordered the parts for my new tower and built my current desktop machine.

services.xserver.autorun and enabling services.xserver.exportConfiguration. Finally, and this may be my bias, but you get the impression that the whole concept is so esoteric and difficult to communicate to non-technical people that the project tends to attract a certain type of developer, the kind that isn’t really interested in things like documentation, organizational policies, backward compatibility, etc. Basically, I mosh into my Nix box and do all my development there from my Mac, which I keep as a thin client.

If you’re a non-technical user, you expect the versions to be curated so that they work, even if they’re not the latest.

Close. When I asked about this peculiar behavior, the response was that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because this way no NPM packages get stale and besides, if you want stability you can always either override the package recipe manually or pin the entire package set to a specific Git revision (which, by the way, isn’t a properly documented thing). The set of options that are of The “standard environment” comes with tools like GCC, bash, coreutils, find, sed, grep, awk, tar, make, patch and all of the major compression tools.

Nix and NixOS ruined me. Nix is right to not introduce silent failure points between upstream packages. Once the command completes, you can then use the newly installed packages. For the most part, configuring xinit is quite simple - the Arch