NixOS module

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 to the root user. For example, if you are following Nixpkgs master or an unstable channel, you can run

$ sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager
$ sudo nix-channel --update

and if you follow a Nixpkgs version 24.05 channel, you can run

$ sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-24.05.tar.gz home-manager
$ sudo 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;

  # The state version is required and should stay at the version you
  # originally installed.
  home.stateVersion = "24.05";
};

and after a sudo nixos-rebuild switch the user eve's environment should include a basic Bash configuration and the packages atool and httpie.

:::{.note} If nixos-rebuild switch does not result in the environment you expect, you can take a look at the output of the Home Manager activation script output using

$ systemctl status "home-manager-$USER.service"

:::

If you do not plan on having Home Manager manage your shell configuration then you must add either

. "$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh"

. "/etc/profiles/per-user/$USER/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh"

to your shell configuration, depending on whether home-manager.useUserPackages is enabled. This file can be sourced directly by POSIX.2-like shells such as Bash or Z shell. Fish users can use utilities such as foreign-env or babelfish.

:::{.note} 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. :::

:::{.note} 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. :::

:::{.note} Home Manager will pass osConfig as a module argument to any modules you create. This contains the system's NixOS configuration.

{ lib, pkgs, osConfig, ... }:

:::

Once installed you can see Using Home Manager for a more detailed description of Home Manager and how to use it.

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NixOS module

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