Personal Nix Configuration

This is my personal Nix configuration used on MacOS.

Prerequisites

1. install nix version 2.4 or later
2. install nix-darwin

note: you don’t need to install home-manger, nix-darwin will install it instead.

Setup (Darwin)

• Clone this to $HOME/src/nix

cd $HOME/src && git clone https://github.com/Eason0210/nix.git 

• Change all the username(aqua0210 is my username) in darwin.nix and home.nix
• Remove apps you don’t need in packages.nix
• Check all the config is good for you and run this command in terminal.

nix build ~/src/nix\#darwinConfigurations.MacBook.system
# when build succeed, run:
darwin-rebuild switch --flake ~/src/nix

hint: MacBook is my hostname

Other useful commands

darwin-rebuild --list-generations # list all generations
darwin-rebuild --rollback # rollback to previous generation
nix-collect-garbage -d    # remove all other generations except current one

Install Emacs

Please refer to nix-community/emacs-verlay

• EmacsGit install the master branch of Emacs, recently is Emacs 28.0.50
• Emacs install Emacs latest realease, Emacs 27.2
• EmacsGcc Install master branch with options --with-native-compilation enabled

Pin the version of EmacsGit and EmacsGcc

You need to specify a specific Git revision, along with its hash, in order to avoid re-downloading new versions of the overlay constantly.

Concretely, that means:

1. Change the master string in the url field of builtins.fetchTarball to a specific commit hash.
2. Add a sha256 field to builtins.fetchTarball set to 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
3. Try to build (darwin-rebuild switch)
4. It will complain about the hash being incorrect (expected zeros, actually the real hash)
5. Replace the zeros with the real hash

… Profit

refer to this issue.

Uninstall Nix on Mac

• Nix Multi User Installation (Nix 2.4 or later)
• Refer to nix-on-macos-catalina.md (before Nix 2.4)

Reference

1. LnL7/nix-darwin
2. srid/nixos-config
3. kclejeune/system
4. jwiegley/nix-config