ca.desrt.dconf
?This manual will eventually describes how to install, use, and extend Home Manager.
If you encounter problems then please reach out on the IRC channel #home-manager hosted by freenode. The channel logs are hosted courtesy of samueldr. If your problem is caused by a bug in Home Manager then it should be reported on the Home Manager issue tracker.
Commands prefixed with #
have to be run as root, either
requiring to login as root user or temporarily switching to it using
sudo
for example.
Home Manager can be used in three primary ways:
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
Section 1.1, “Standalone installation” for instructions on how to perform this
installation.
nixos-rebuild
. See Section 1.2, “NixOS module” for a description of
this setup.
darwin-rebuild
. See Section 1.3, “nix-darwin module”
for a description of this setup.
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. If you are following Nixpkgs master or an unstable channel then this is done by running
$ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update
and if you follow a Nixpkgs version 20.09 channel, you can run
$ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-20.09.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update
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
$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh
file in your shell configuration. Alternatively source
/etc/profiles/per-user/$USER/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh
when managing home configuration together with system 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.
Home Manager provides a NixOS module that allows you to prepare user
environments directly from the system configuration file, which often
is more convenient than using the home-manager
tool. It also opens
up additional possibilities, for example, to automatically configure
user environments in NixOS declarative containers or on systems
deployed through NixOps.
To make the NixOS module available for use you must import
it into
your system configuration. This is most conveniently done by adding a
Home Manager channel. For example, if you are following Nixpkgs master
or an unstable channel, you can run
# nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager # nix-channel --update
and if you follow a Nixpkgs version 20.09 channel, you can run
# nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-20.09.tar.gz home-manager # nix-channel --update
It is then possible to add
imports = [ <home-manager/nixos> ];
to your system configuration.nix
file, which will introduce a new
NixOS option called home-manager.users
whose type is an attribute
set that maps user names to Home Manager configurations.
For example, a NixOS configuration may include the lines
users.users.eve.isNormalUser = true; home-manager.users.eve = { pkgs, ... }: { home.packages = [ pkgs.atool pkgs.httpie ]; programs.bash.enable = true; };
and after a nixos-rebuild switch
the user eve’s environment should
include a basic Bash configuration and the packages atool and httpie.
By default packages will be installed to $HOME/.nix-profile
but they
can be installed to /etc/profiles
if
home-manager.useUserPackages = true;
is added to the system configuration. This is necessary if, for
example, you wish to use nixos-rebuild build-vm
. This option may
become the default value in the future.
By default, Home Manager uses a private pkgs
instance that is
configured via the home-manager.users.<name>.nixpkgs
options. To
instead use the global pkgs
that is configured via the system level
nixpkgs
options, set
home-manager.useGlobalPkgs = true;
This saves an extra Nixpkgs evaluation, adds consistency, and removes
the dependency on NIX_PATH
, which is otherwise used for importing
Nixpkgs.
Home Manager provides a module that allows you to prepare user
environments directly from the nix-darwin configuration
file, which often is more convenient than using the home-manager
tool.
To make the NixOS module available for use you must import
it into
your system configuration. This is most conveniently done by adding a
Home Manager channel. For example, if you are following Nixpkgs master
or an unstable channel, you can run
# nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager # nix-channel --update
and if you follow a Nixpkgs version 20.09 channel, you can run
# nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-20.09.tar.gz home-manager # nix-channel --update
It is then possible to add
imports = [ <home-manager/nix-darwin> ];
to your nix-darwin configuration.nix
file, which will introduce a
new NixOS option called home-manager
whose type is an attribute set
that maps user names to Home Manager configurations.
For example, a nix-darwin configuration may include the lines
home-manager.users.eve = { pkgs, ... }: { home.packages = [ pkgs.atool pkgs.httpie ]; programs.bash.enable = true; };
and after a darwin-rebuild --switch
the user eve’s environment
should include a basic Bash configuration and the packages atool and
httpie.
By default user packages will not be ignored in favor of
environment.systemPackages
, but they will be intalled to
/etc/profiles/per-user/$USERNAME
if
home-manager.useUserPackages = true;
is added to the nix-darwin configuration. This option may become the default value in the future.
By default, Home Manager uses a private pkgs
instance that is
configured via the home-manager.users.<name>.nixpkgs
options. To
instead use the global pkgs
that is configured via the system level
nixpkgs
options, set
home-manager.useGlobalPkgs = true;
This saves an extra Nixpkgs evaluation, adds consistency, and removes
the dependency on NIX_PATH
, which is otherwise used for importing
Nixpkgs.
The module system in Home Manager is based entirely on the NixOS module system so we will here only highlight aspects that are specific for Home Manager. For information about the module system as such please refer to the Writing NixOS Modules chapter of the NixOS manual.
Overall the basic option types are the same in Home Manager as NixOS. A few Home Manager options, however, make use of custom types that are worth describing in more detail. These are the option types dagOf
and gvariant
that are used, for example, by programs.ssh.matchBlocks
and dconf.settings
.
hm.types.dagOf
Options of this type have attribute sets as values where each member is a node in a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This allows the attribute set entries to express dependency relations among themselves. This can, for example, be used to control the order of match blocks in a OpenSSH client configuration or the order of activation script blocks in home.activation
.
A number of functions are provided to create DAG nodes. The functions are shown below with examples using an option foo.bar
of type hm.types.dagOf types.int
.
hm.dag.entryAnywhere (value: T)
Indicates that value
can be placed anywhere within the DAG. This is also the default for plain attribute set entries, that is
foo.bar = { a = hm.dag.entryAnywhere 0; }
and
foo.bar = { a = 0; }
are equivalent.
hm.dag.entryAfter (afters: list string) (value: T)
Indicates that value
must be placed after each of the attribute names in the given list. For example
foo.bar = { a = 0; b = hm.dag.entryAfter [ "a" ] 1; }
would place b
after a
in the graph.
hm.dag.entryBefore (befores: list string) (value: T)
Indicates that value
must be placed before each of the attribute names in the given list. For example
foo.bar = { b = hm.dag.entryBefore [ "a" ] 1; a = 0; }
would place b
before a
in the graph.
hm.dag.entryBetween (befores: list string) (afters: list string) (value: T)
Indicates that value
must be placed before the attribute names in the first list and after the attribute names in the second list. For example
foo.bar = { a = 0; c = hm.dag.entryBetween [ "b" ] [ "a" ] 2; b = 1; }
would place c
before b
and after a
in the graph.
hm.types.gvariant
This type is useful for options representing GVariant values. The type accepts all primitive GVariant types as well as arrays and tuples. Dictionaries are not currently supported.
To create a GVariant value you can use a number of provided functions. Examples assume an option foo.bar
of type hm.types.gvariant
.
hm.gvariant.mkBoolean (v: bool)
Takes a Nix value v
to a GVariant boolean
value. Note, Nix booleans are automatically coerced using this function. That is,
foo.bar = hm.gvariant.mkBoolean true;
is equivalent to
foo.bar = true;
hm.gvariant.mkString (v: string)
Takes a Nix value v
to a GVariant string
value. Note, Nix strings are automatically coerced using this function. That is,
foo.bar = hm.gvariant.mkString "a string";
is equivalent to
foo.bar = "a string";
hm.gvariant.mkObjectpath (v: string)
v
to a GVariant objectpath
value.
hm.gvariant.mkUchar (v: string)
v
to a GVariant uchar
value.
hm.gvariant.mkInt16 (v: int)
v
to a GVariant int16
value.
hm.gvariant.mkUint16 (v: int)
v
to a GVariant uint16
value.
hm.gvariant.mkInt32 (v: int)
Takes a Nix value v
to a GVariant int32
value. Note, Nix integers are automatically coerced using this function. That is,
foo.bar = hm.gvariant.mkInt32 7;
is equivalent to
foo.bar = 7;
hm.gvariant.mkUint32 (v: int)
v
to a GVariant uint32
value.
hm.gvariant.mkInt64 (v: int)
v
to a GVariant int64
value.
hm.gvariant.mkUint64 (v: int)
v
to a GVariant uint64
value.
hm.gvariant.mkDouble (v: double)
Takes a Nix value v
to a GVariant double
value. Note, Nix floats are automatically coerced using this function. That is,
foo.bar = hm.gvariant.mkDouble 3.14;
is equivalent to
foo.bar = 3.14;
hm.gvariant.mkArray type elements
Builds a GVariant array containing the given list of elements, where each element is a GVariant value of the given type. The type
value can be constructed using
hm.gvariant.type.string
hm.gvariant.type.boolean
hm.gvariant.type.uchar
hm.gvariant.type.int16
hm.gvariant.type.uint16
hm.gvariant.type.int32
hm.gvariant.type.uint32
hm.gvariant.type.int64
hm.gvariant.type.uint64
hm.gvariant.type.double
hm.gvariant.type.arrayOf type
hm.gvariant.type.maybeOf type
hm.gvariant.type.tupleOf types
where type
and types
are themselves a type and list of types, respectively.
hm.gvariant.mkEmptyArray type
hm.gvariant.mkArray type []
.
hm.gvariant.mkNothing type
type
value is constructed as described for the mkArray
function above.
hm.gvariant.mkJust element
hm.gvariant.mkTuple elements
Contributions to Home Manager are very welcome. To make the process as smooth as possible for both you and the Home Manager maintainers we provide some guidelines that we ask you to follow. See Section 3.1, “Getting started” for information on how to set up a suitable development environment and Section 3.2, “Guidelines” for the actual guidelines.
This text is mainly directed at those who would like to make code contributions to Home Manager. If you just want to report a bug then first look among the already open issues, if you find one matching yours then feel free to comment on it to add any additional information you may have. If no matching issue exists then go to the new issue page and write a description of your problem. Include as much information as you can, ideally also include relevant excerpts from your Home Manager configuration.
If you have not previously forked Home Manager then you need to do that first. Have a look at GitHub’s Fork a repo for instructions on how to do this.
Once you have a fork of Home Manager you should create a branch starting at the most recent master
branch. Give your branch a reasonably descriptive name. Commit your changes to this branch and when you are happy with the result and it fulfills Section 3.2, “Guidelines” then push the branch to GitHub and create a pull request.
Assuming your clone is at $HOME/devel/home-manager
then you can make the home-manager
command use it by either
overriding the default path by using the -I
command line option:
$ home-manager -I home-manager=$HOME/devel/home-manager
or
changing the default path by ensuring your configuration includes
programs.home-manager.enable = true; programs.home-manager.path = "$HOME/devel/home-manager";
and running home-manager switch
to activate the change. Afterwards, home-manager build
and home-manager switch
will use your cloned repository.
The first option is good if you only temporarily want to use your clone.
If your contribution satisfy the following rules then there is a good chance it will be merged without too much trouble. The rules are enforced by the Home Manager maintainers and to a lesser extent the Home Manager CI system.
If you are uncertain how these rules affect the change you would like to make then feel free to start a discussion in the #home-manager IRC channel, ideally before you start developing.
Your contribution should not cause another user’s existing configuration to break unless there is a very good reason and the change should be announced to the user through an assertion or similar.
Remember that Home Manager is used in many different environments and you should consider how your change may effect others. For example,
The master branch of Home Manager tracks the unstable channel of Nixpkgs, which may update package versions at any time. It is therefore important to consider how a package update may affect your code and try to reduce the risk of breakage.
The most effective way to reduce this risk is to follow the advice in Section 3.2.3, “Add only valuable options”.
When creating a new module it is tempting to include every option supported by the software. This is strongly discouraged. Providing many options increases maintenance burden and risk of breakage considerably. This is why only the most important software options should be modeled explicitly. Less important options should be expressible through an extraConfig
escape hatch.
A good rule of thumb for the first implementation of a module is to only add explicit options for those settings that absolutely must be set for the software to function correctly. It follows that a module for software that provides sensible default values for all settings would require no explicit options at all.
If the software uses a structured configuration format like a JSON, YAML, INI, TOML, or even a plain list of key/value pairs then consider using a settings
option as described in Nix RFC 42.
If at all possible, make sure to add new tests and expand existing tests so that your change will keep working in the future. See Section 3.6, “Tests” for more information about the Home Manager test suite.
All contributed code must pass the test suite.
Many code changes require changing the documentation as well. Module options should be documented with DocBook. See DocBook rocks! for a quick introduction and DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide for in-depth information of DocBook. Home Manager is itself documented using a combination of DocBook and AsciiDoc. All text is hosted in Home Manager’s Git repository.
The HTML version of the manual containing both the module option descriptions and the documentation of Home Manager can be generated and opened by typing the following in a shell within a clone of the Home Manager Git repository:
$ nix-build -A docs.html $ xdg-open ./result/share/doc/home-manager/index.html
When you have made changes to a module, it is a good idea to check that the man page version of the module options looks good:
$ nix-build -A docs.manPages $ man ./result/share/man/man5/home-configuration.nix.5
Every new module must include a named maintainer using the meta.maintainers
attribute. If you are a user of a module that currently lacks a maintainer then please consider adopting it.
If you are present in the NixOS maintainer list then you can use that entry. If you are not then you can add yourself to modules/lib/maintainers.nix
in the Home Manager project.
Also add yourself to .github/CODEOWNERS
as owner of the associated module files, including the test files. You will then be automatically added as a reviewer on any new pull request that touches your files.
Maintainers are encouraged to join the IRC channel and participate when they have opportunity.
Make sure your code is formatted as described in Section 3.4, “Code Style”. To maintain consistency throughout the project you are encouraged to browse through existing code and adopt its style also in new code.
Similar to Section 3.2.7, “Format your code” we encourage a consistent commit message format as described in Section 3.3, “Commits”.
If your contribution includes a change that should be communicated to users of Home Manager then you can add a news entry. The entry must be formatted as described in Section 3.5, “News”.
When new modules are added a news entry should be included but you do not need to create this entry manually. The merging maintainer will create the entry for you. This is to reduce the risk of merge conflicts.
Home Manager includes a number of modules that are only usable on some of the supported platforms. The most common example of platform specific modules are those that define systemd user services, which only works on Linux systems.
If you add a module that is platform specific then make sure to include a condition in the loadModule
function call. This will make the module accessible only on systems where the condition evaluates to true
.
Similarly, if you are adding a news entry then it should be shown only to users that may find it relevant, see Section 3.5, “News” for a description of conditional news.
The Home Manager project is covered by the MIT license and we can only accept contributions that fall under this license, or are licensed in a compatible way. When you contribute self written code and documentation it is assumed that you are doing so under the MIT license.
A potential gotcha with respect to licensing are option descriptions. Often it is convenient to copy from the upstream software documentation. When this is done it is important to verify that the license of the upstream documentation allows redistribution under the terms of the MIT license.
The commits in your pull request should be reasonably self-contained, that is, each commit should make sense in isolation. In particular, you will be asked to amend any commit that introduces syntax errors or similar problems even if they are fixed in a later commit.
The commit messages should follow the seven rules. We also ask you to include the affected code component or module in the first line. That is, a commit message should follow the template
{component}: {description} {long description}
where {component}
refers to the code component (or module) your change affects, {description}
is a very brief description of your change, and {long description}
is an optional clarifying description. Note, {description}
should start with a lower case letter. As a rare exception, if there is no clear component, or your change affects many components, then the {component}
part is optional. See Example 3.1, “Compliant commit message” for a commit message that fulfills these requirements.
Example 3.1. Compliant commit message
The commit 69f8e47e9e74c8d3d060ca22e18246b7f7d988ef contains the commit message
starship: allow running in Emacs if vterm is used The vterm buffer is backed by libvterm and can handle Starship prompts without issues.
which ticks all the boxes necessary to be accepted in Home Manager.
Finally, when adding a new module, say programs/foo.nix
, we use the fixed commit format foo: add module
. You can, of course, still include a long description if you wish.
The code in Home Manager is formatted by the nixfmt tool and the formatting is checked in the pull request tests. Run the format
tool inside the project repository before submitting your pull request.
Keep lines at a reasonable width, ideally 80 characters or less. This also applies to string literals.
We prefer lowerCamelCase
for variable and attribute names with the accepted exception of variables directly referencing packages in Nixpkgs which use a hyphenated style. For example, the Home Manager option services.gpg-agent.enableSshSupport
references the gpg-agent
package in Nixpkgs.
Home Manager includes a system for presenting news to the user. When making a change you, therefore, have the option to also include an associated news entry. In general, a news entry should only be added for truly noteworthy news. For example, a bug fix or new option does generally not need a news entry.
If you do have a change worthy of a news entry then please add one in news.nix
but you should follow some basic guidelines:
The entry timestamp should be in ISO-8601 format having "+00:00" as time zone. For example, "2017-09-13T17:10:14+00:00". A suitable timestamp can be produced by the command
$ date --iso-8601=second --universal
If you refer to an option then write its full attribute path. That is, instead of writing
The option 'foo' has been deprecated, please use 'bar' instead.
it should read
The option 'services.myservice.foo' has been deprecated, please use 'services.myservice.bar' instead.
A new module, say foo.nix
, should always include a news entry that has a message along the lines of
A new module is available: 'services.foo'.
If the module is platform specific, e.g., a service module using systemd, then a condition like
condition = hostPlatform.isLinux;
should be added. If you contribute a module then you don’t need to add this entry, the merger will create an entry for you.
Home Manager includes a basic test suite and it is highly recommended to include at least one test when adding a module. Tests are typically in the form of "golden tests" where, for example, a generated configuration file is compared to a known correct file.
It is relatively easy to create tests by modeling the existing tests, found in the tests
project directory.
The full Home Manager test suite can be run by executing
$ nix-shell --pure tests -A run.all
in the project root. List all test cases through
$ nix-shell --pure tests -A list
and run an individual test, for example alacritty-empty-settings
, through
$ nix-shell --pure tests -A run.alacritty-empty-settings
Home Manager currently installs packages into the user environment, precisely as if the packages were installed through nix-env --install
. This means that you will get a collision error if your Home Manager configuration attempts to install a package that you already have installed manually, that is, packages that shows up when you run nix-env --query
.
For example, imagine you have the hello
package installed in your environment
$ nix-env --query hello-2.10
and your Home Manager configuration contains
home.packages = [ pkgs.hello ];
Then attempting to switch to this configuration will result in an error similar to
$ home-manager switch these derivations will be built: /nix/store/xg69wsnd1rp8xgs9qfsjal017nf0ldhm-home-manager-path.drv […] Activating installPackages replacing old ‘home-manager-path’ installing ‘home-manager-path’ building path(s) ‘/nix/store/b5c0asjz9f06l52l9812w6k39ifr49jj-user-environment’ Wide character in die at /nix/store/64jc9gd2rkbgdb4yjx3nrgc91bpjj5ky-buildenv.pl line 79. collision between ‘/nix/store/fmwa4axzghz11cnln5absh31nbhs9lq1-home-manager-path/bin/hello’ and ‘/nix/store/c2wyl8b9p4afivpcz8jplc9kis8rj36d-hello-2.10/bin/hello’; use ‘nix-env --set-flag priority NUMBER PKGNAME’ to change the priority of one of the conflicting packages builder for ‘/nix/store/b37x3s7pzxbasfqhaca5dqbf3pjjw0ip-user-environment.drv’ failed with exit code 2 error: build of ‘/nix/store/b37x3s7pzxbasfqhaca5dqbf3pjjw0ip-user-environment.drv’ failed
The solution is typically to uninstall the package from the environment using nix-env --uninstall
and reattempt the Home Manager generation switch.
Home Manager is only able to set session variables automatically if it manages your Bash or Z shell configuration. If you don’t want to let Home Manager manage your shell then you will have to manually source the ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh
file in an appropriate way. In Bash and Z shell this can be done by adding
. "$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh"
to your .profile
and .zshrc
files, respectively. The hm-session-vars.sh
file should work in most Bourne-like shells.
A typical way to prepare a repository of configurations for multiple logins and machines is to prepare one "top-level" file for each unique combination.
For example, if you have two machines, called "kronos" and "rhea" on which you want to configure your user "jane" then you could create the files
kronos-jane.nix
,
rhea-jane.nix
, and
common.nix
in your repository. On the kronos and rhea machines you can then make ~jane/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix
be a symbolic link to the corresponding file in your configuration repository.
The kronos-jane.nix
and rhea-jane.nix
files follow the format
{ ... }: { imports = [ ./common.nix ]; # Various options that are specific for this machine/user. }
while the common.nix
file contains configuration shared across the two logins. Of course, instead of just a single common.nix
file you can have multiple ones, even one per program or service.
You can get some inspiration from the Post your home-manager home.nix file! Reddit thread.
You are most likely trying to configure the GTK or Gnome Terminal but the DBus session is not aware of the dconf service. The full error you might get is
error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name ca.desrt.dconf was not provided by any .service files
The solution on NixOS is to add
services.dbus.packages = with pkgs; [ gnome3.dconf ];
to your system configuration.
If you are using a stable version of Nixpkgs but would like to install some particular packages from Nixpkgs unstable – or some other channel – then you can import the unstable Nixpkgs and refer to its packages within your configuration. Something like
{ pkgs, config, ... }: let pkgsUnstable = import <nixpkgs-unstable> {}; in { home.packages = [ pkgsUnstable.foo ]; # … }
should work provided you have a Nix channel called nixpkgs-unstable
.
You can add the nixpkgs-unstable
channel by running
# nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable nixpkgs-unstable # nix-channel --update
Note, the package will not be affected by any package overrides, overlays, etc.
By default Home Manager will install the package provided by your chosen nixpkgs
channel but occasionally you might end up needing to change this package. This can typically be done in two ways.
If the module provides a package
option, such as programs.beets.package
, then this is the recommended way to perform the override. For example,
programs.beets.package = pkgs.beets.override { enableCheck = true; };
If no package
option is available then you can typically override the relevant package using an overlay.
For example, if you want to use the programs.skim
module but use the skim
package from Nixpkgs unstable, then a configuration like
{ pkgs, config, ... }: let pkgsUnstable = import <nixpkgs-unstable> {}; in { programs.skim.enable = true; nixpkgs.overlays = [ (self: super: { skim = pkgsUnstable.skim; }) ]; # … }
should work OK.