services.lorri.enable creates a service that doesn't see my channels

[NobbZ]

The lorri daemon started through the created service uses the systems channel (20.03) rather than my users (unstable).

If though I temporarily disable the systemd managed lorri daemon and start one in a shell, this deamon uses the correct channel.

[Kloenk]

Do you mean nixpkgs channel? Did you see the option home-manager.useGlobalPkgs under nixos? or are you not using nixos?

[NobbZ]

I'm on nixOS, though manage my HM "per user" in home.nix, not as a module in my configuration.nix.

[NobbZ]

And yes, I'm talking about nixpkgs channel.

Under "normal" circumstances I access the systems channel as nixos, the users channel as nixpkgs. nix-channels --list doesn't even tell me anything about the nixos one:

home-manager https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable

[Kloenk]

Could you please try to exchange your home-manager with this one? https://github.com/kloenk/home-manager/archive/lorri-env.tar.gz. Maybe that will work

[rycee]

I imagine this is related to NIX_PATH not being imported into the systemd user session. You can try adding

systemd.user.services.lorri.Service.Environment = [ "NIX_PATH=…" ];

where … is the output of echo $NIX_PATH in a shell.

[Kloenk]

You could of course directly set it in the home.nix file, I forgot. my patched home-manager version does the same.

To make in dynamic (and impure) you can use ${builtins.getEnv "NIX_PATH"} as the NIX_PATH

[NobbZ]

Thanks, adding to systemd.user.services.lorri.Service.Environment seems to do the trick.

Perhaps this can be abstracted behind another option?

PS: Feel free to close if you consider that abstraction a "wont-fix".

[Kloenk]

A own option for this would be great. It would not destroy the current setting of the environment, and also we could default to a sane option like the default path of channels. This would make it all pure, if we don't have to use builtins.readEnv. Will see if a have the time to create a PR.

Are there other services which needs this environment variable? Then we should make it a global option

[rycee]

I suspect the best solution would be set NIX_PATH using PAM instead of in the shell, which would avoid the need for a lorri specific solution. The NixOS setup does set it with PAM it omits the ~/.nix-defexpr/channels directory for some reason and only includes the system level ones.

Alternatively, I think one could use environment.d.

[Kloenk]

Is PAM forwarded into systemd?

[PierreR]

To use the systemd.user.services.lorri.service.environment workaround do I need to patch the lorri service module locally (by copy/pasting it) ?

[PierreR]

Anyhow, doing so, works for me.
That issue hit me hard ... My overlays defined in NIX_PATH was silently ignored in Lorri ...

[PierreR]

@rycee Do you thing a PR to pass the NIX_PATH as a parameter to modules/services/lorri.nix would be useful ?

[Kloenk]

@rycee Do you thing a PR to pass the NIX_PATH as a parameter to modules/services/lorri.nix would be useful ?

I think it is a better approach to run systemctl --user set-environment NIX_PATH=$NIX_PATH somewhere, so this config is not set into the nix store.

[rycee]

@Kloenk Yeah, I believe PAM sets the environment variables before the systemd user session starts. You should see the values it sets by running

$ systemctl --user show-environment | grep NIX_PATH

So I suspect the best course of action would be to see why NixOS doesn't add the user's channels to NIX_PATH using PAM. And for non-NixOS users to see if it would work to set up NIX_PATH using pam.sessionVariables.

[DamienCassou]

@rycee I tried what you suggest but it fails:

$ systemctl --user show-environment | grep NIX_PATH
NIX_PATH=/home/cassou/.nix-defexpr/channels

$ cat ~/.pam_environment 
NIX_PATH OVERRIDE="/home/cassou/Documents/projects/nix-system"

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