My simple nix-darwin & NixOS (WSL) configuration

This is my dead-simple configuration. Maybe something to take inspiration from if you're trying to get set up with your own cross-platform NixOS, WSL, and nix-darwin configuration!

This repo entirely supersedes clo4/dotfiles.

License

This repository is public domain. You can copy/paste any code from it that you want. I don't believe that something as small and inconsequential as my computer's configuration should have any protections applied to it - this is stuff we should be sharing freely to improve everyone's setups! If you find anything in this repo that you like, feel free to take it and use it anywhere.

Any code in this repository that is under another license (at time of writing, there is none) will have the appropriate license above it and the section of code that the license applies to will be clearly delineated.

Structure

The goal of the directory structure is to be as simple and consistent as possible.

• flake.nix is where the systems are declared and the modules they need are defined.
• shared/ defines the configuration shared between multiple hosts.
  • home.nix contains the home configuration shared by each system
  • host.nix contains the system configuration shared by each system
  • brew.nix defines homebrew-specific stuff for Macs that use nix-darwin.
• systems/ stores the configuration for each machine.
  • <host>/home.nix is the system-specific home config
  • <host>/host.nix is the system-specific host config
• programs/ is where I move my program configuration when it gets too long to store in my home config. By default, programs are configured wherever is most appropriate, and when they start to take up too much room or require certain things enabled on particular systems, I move the configuration to a module and put it in this directory.
• modules/ is where modules are defined. This is both system and home-manager modules. These modules are imported by the respective common files, which allows any file that uses the common settings to use the modules too.

My Nix Workflow

There are projects I want to contribute to that don't use Nix, but I want to keep all the tools local to the project so I don't pollute my global configuration. I could do this using shell.nix or something like that, but flakes are a much better solution. Unfortunately, flakes need to be checked into the repository, so that's inconvenient.

The solution I came up with is to create a .flake/ directory. This is a self contained git repository, in the root of the project's repo. This is globally ignored by Git so it will never be checked in. Using this, you can simply cd into it, make any changes you like, and run a shell from it with nix develop .flake. It's a really simple workflow!

To make this work, this repo contains a template (templates/untracked-flake) and a fish function (mkflake). Those are the only additional things required, because you can use the tooling you already know for the rest.

Commit messages

I prefer to use the format of conventional commits but with tags that make sense in this context.

• For changes to host-specific configuration, use the label <host>:, e.g. macmini:
• For changes to common configuration, use either home: or host: depending on what is changing.
• For changes to program configuration, use the name of the program, e.g. fish:
• For changes to modules, use the name of the module, e.g. zed: