home-manager/docs/release-notes/rl-2405.md

Release 24.05

This is the current unstable branch and the information in this section is therefore not final.

Highlights

This release has the following notable changes:

• The .release file in the Home Manager project root has been removed. Please use the release.json file instead.

• The {command}home-manager uninstall command has been reworked to, hopefully, be more robust. The new implementation makes use of a new Boolean configuration option uninstall that can also be used in a pure Nix Flake setup.

  Specifically, if you are using a Flake only installation, then you can clean up a Home Manager installation by adding

  uninstall = true;
  

  to your existing configuration and then build and activate. This will override any other configuration and cause, for example, the removal of all managed files.

  Please be very careful when enabling this option since activating the built configuration will not only remove the managed files but all Home Manager state from your user environment. This includes removing all your historic Home Manager generations!

• The use of $DRY_RUN_CMD and $DRY_RUN_NULL in activation script blocks is now deprecated. Instead use the new shell function {command}run. In most cases it is sufficient to replace $DRY_RUN_CMD by {command}run. For example, if your configuration currently contains

  home.activation.reportChanges = config.lib.dag.entryAnywhere ''
    if [[ -v oldGenPath ]]; then
      $DRY_RUN_CMD nix store diff-closures $oldGenPath $newGenPath
    fi
  '';
  

  then you are now encouraged to change to

  home.activation.reportChanges = config.lib.dag.entryAnywhere ''
    if [[ -v oldGenPath ]]; then
      run nix store diff-closures $oldGenPath $newGenPath
    fi
  '';
  

  See the description of home.activation for more. The deprecated variables will continue to work for now but their use may in the future trigger a warning message and eventually they may be removed entirely.

• Similarly, the use of $VERBOSE_ECHO in activation script blocks is deprecated. Instead use the new shell function {command}verboseEcho. That is,

  home.activation.doThing = config.lib.dag.entryAnywhere ''
    $VERBOSE_ECHO "Doing the thing"
  ''
  

  should now be expressed

  home.activation.doThing = config.lib.dag.entryAnywhere ''
    verboseEcho "Doing the thing"
  ''
  

  See the description of home.activation for more. The deprecated variable will continue to work for now but its use may in the future trigger a warning message and eventually it may be removed entirely.

• The home-manager Nix profile update that the Home Manager activation script has previously performed is now deprecated. The profile update is instead the responsibility of the software calling the activation script, such as the home-manager tool..

  The legacy behavior is the default for backwards compatibility but may be emit a deprecation warning in the future, for eventual removal. If you have developed tooling that directly call the generated activation script, then you are encouraged to adapt to the new behavior. See Activation for details on how to call the activation script.

• The home-manager switch command now offers a --rollback option. When given, the switch performs a rollback to the Home Manager generation prior to the current before activating. While it was previously possible to accomplish this by manually activating an old generation, it always created a new profile generation. The new behavior mirrors the behavior of nixos-rebuild switch --rollback. See the Rollbacks section for more.

• When using Home Manager as a NixOS or nix-darwin module we previously created an unnecessary home-manager per-user "shadow profile" for the user. This no longer happens.

State Version Changes

The state version in this release includes the changes below. These changes are only active if the home.stateVersion option is set to "24.05" or later.

• Nothing, yet.