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arussell84
Asked: 2015-08-23 23:32:47 +0800 CST

NixOS reproducible users and packages?

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I'm new to NixOS and trying to learn its concepts. One of the reasons I'm excited about it is I'm hoping it will be able to give me a reproducible system configuration, similar to using Ansible for localhost. However, I am not sure how to achieve this.

I am aware of environment.systemPackages in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix, but these are system-wide packages only. I also know that the nix-env command can install a package for a user, but I'd rather declare such a package in a file that I can check into source control.

Is there a particular file I can configure (similar to a playbook) where I could declare a set of packages for a user? Or at least specify its "user environment" or "profiles" (not sure which term is correct)?

Ideally I could take a few files, copy them to another computer, run a command, and it's at the same state as the old computer, including multiple users with different sets of packages.

Finally, does my use case mean that I should never use nix-env to install packages?

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    So I asked the folks on the Freenode #nixos IRC channel, and they led me to this answer.

    I need to create a ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix file. In that file, I need to create a package collection using the buildEnv function and install it with nix-env.

    Installing ad-hoc packages using nix-env does not update ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix, so for my use case I would want to avoid doing that. Although, it is worth noting that installing ad-hoc packages using nix-env is still useful for experimentation since installing the package collection using the --remove-all switch would remove everything not in that package collection.

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