Best way to extract dotfiles from home-manager?

[colinxs]

Issue description

I'd like to backup the dotfiles generated by home-manager. Looking at the source, it appears all the generated symlinks point to files in the home-files package so I could just backup this directory. I'm hesitant to depend on an internal API, however. Is there another way to get a list of all files managed by home-manager so I can back them up?

Thanks!

Meta

Maintainer CC

Technical details

• system: "x86_64-linux"
• host os: Linux 5.6.0-1020-oem, Pop!_OS, 20.04 LTS
• multi-user?: yes
• sandbox: yes
• version: nix-env (Nix) 2.3.9
• channels(root): "nixpkgs-21.03pre258115.8006772a054"
• nixpkgs: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixpkgs

[cole-h]

I'm curious as to why you'd rather back up the files rather than the config that generated those files. It seems like a better idea to just backup your home.nix (and whatever else it imports) than to somehow enumerate all home-files and back those up.

[peterhoeg]

I'm with @cole-h on this - the output really doesn't matter so I don't really see the point in this. But just in case you really do want it, you can wire up a script that does something like this:

1. get the path to the most recent generation in the nix store: home-manager generations | head -n1 | gawk '{ print $7 }'
2. copy out the contents of home-files inside that directory

[colinxs]

Hey all, sorry for the late reply. I somehow stopped getting GitHub notifications.

Right now I'm doing:

home.activation.copyHomeFiles = let
  src = config.home-files;
  dest = home.homeDirectory + "/home-files";
in lib.hm.dag.entryAfter [ "installPackages" ] ''
  rm -rf ${dest}
  rsync -ah --copy-links --chmod=D755,F664 --quiet ${src}/ ${dest}
'';

Which is relying on the internal option home-files. Is this fairly safe to rely on or do you expect it to change?

Ideally it would be nice to have to have a command home-manager files that is similar to home-manager packages but lists all managed/modified files (either dotfiles or dconf settings). Even better if it showed which modules were responsible for which dotfiles. Of course that takes time to implement :).

Thanks for the help!

[rycee]

FWIW. I do something like

hmFilesIgnorePatterns =
  concatStringsSep "\n"
  (map (file: "ignore = Path ${file.target}")
  (filter (file: !file.recursive)
  (mapAttrsToList (_: file: file) config.home.file)));

and include hmFilesIgnorePatterns in a Unison configuration I use.