Unofficial nix-darwin installer

This is a combined installer for Nix and nix-darwin. It is UNOFFICIAL and EXPERIMENTAL, so use at your own risk.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://stephank.github.io/nix-darwin-installer/install.sh)"

Requires macOS 10.14 or 10.15. (Does not yet support Big Sur.) Source code on GitHub. A basic installation downloads about 60 MB.

Post-install

At the very end of installation, you may see warnings about files in /etc it has refused to replace. These need to be fixed manually. For example, /etc/bashrc should be a symlink to /etc/static/bashrc, or else Bash won't have the correct PATH and NIX_PATH. (Future updates of macOS itself may also reset these files again.)

Maintaining the installation

To apply changes after editing darwin-configuration.nix:

darwin-rebuild switch

To keep your system up-to-date:

nix-channel --update
darwin-rebuild switch

To clean up old generations of your system:

sudo nix-collect-garbage -d

Advanced installation options

To change the location of nix-darwin configuration, set darwin_config before running the installer:

# This example shows the default location
export darwin_config="$HOME/.nixpkgs/darwin-configuration.nix"

And make sure to also set the environment.darwinConfig option inside configuration itself.

You can also point this at an existing file to directly activate that configuration.

Differences from the official installers

In general, this installer tries to be more opinionated. The goal is to simplify both installation and maintenance, with the default setup optimized for systems with just one user.

These are the differences from the official methods of installing Nix and nix-darwin:

• Combines Nix and nix-darwin in one installation step.

• Assumes you want an (unencrypted) APFS volume for /nix. Spotlight indexing is automatically disabled for this volume.

• Configures all channels (including Nixpkgs) only for the regular user that runs the installer.

Technically, the installer package is similar to the regular Nix installer, but bundles a complete nix-darwin base system instead. It also relies on the nix-darwin activate script to setup nix-daemon and the build users.

Acknowledgements

The installer is based on code from the official Nix installer. (LGPL 2.1)

The site is built with Jekyll, and based on the Solo theme. (MIT)