Home Manager can be used in three primary ways: Using the standalone home-manager tool. For platforms other than NixOS and Darwin, this is the only available choice. It is also recommended for people on NixOS or Darwin that want to manage their home directory independent of the system as a whole. See for instructions on how to perform this installation. As a module within a NixOS system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running nixos-rebuild. See for a description of this setup. As a module within a nix-darwin system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running darwin-rebuild. See for a description of this setup.

Make sure you have a working Nix installation. If you are not using NixOS then it may be necessary to run $ mkdir -m 0755 -p /nix/var/nix/{profiles,gcroots}/per-user/$USER since Home Manager uses these directories to manage your profile generations. On NixOS these should already be available. Also make sure that your user is able to build and install Nix packages. For example, you should be able to successfully run a command like nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs>' -A hello without having to switch to the root user. For a multi-user install of Nix this means that your user must be covered by the allowed-users Nix option. On NixOS you can control this option using the nix.allowedUsers system option. Add the Home Manager channel that you wish to follow. This is done by running $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update if you are following Nixpkgs master or an unstable channel and $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/release-18.09.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update if you follow a Nixpkgs version 18.09 channel. On NixOS you may need to log out and back in for the channel to become available. On non-NixOS you may have to add export NIX_PATH=$HOME/.nix-defexpr/channels${NIX_PATH:+:}$NIX_PATH to your shell (see nix#2033). Run the Home Manager installation command and create the first Home Manager generation: $ nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install Once finished, Home Manager should be active and available in your user environment. If you do not plan on having Home Manager manage your shell configuration then you must source the $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh file in your shell configuration. Unfortunately, we currently only support POSIX.2-like shells such as Bash or Z shell. For example, if you use Bash then add . "$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh" to your ~/.profile file. If instead of using channels you want to run Home Manager from a Git checkout of the repository then you can use the programs.home-manager.path option to specify the absolute path to the repository.

To be done.

To be done.