Standalone home manager support

[arnarg]

It would be nice to have support for a standalone home manager system, like flake's homeConfigurations. Would you be open to accepting this into nilla?

The cli would probably need the home-manager cli as a dependency like it does with nixos-rebuild-ng.

The flake version accepts homeConfigurations."<user>" or homeConfigurations."<user>@<hostname>" and the cli looks for an existing one using that info if not specified. Would you want something similar in nilla cli?

[jakehamilton]

This is tough! I'm currently trying to figure out just how much Nilla should do since extensibility is a big benefit. I'm not sure about committing to home-manager support just yet, but that is the direction that I am currently leaning. I think the way to handle this right now would be for people to experiment with different implementations of this feature to find some of the pain points and how it could best be integrated with other options.

[arnarg]

Makes sense! Thanks for the explanation.

I'm definitely intrigued by nilla and I'm thinking of switching my nixos and home manager configs to it soon.

[mainrs]

Is there any way to manually configure homeConfigurations outputs using nilla? Even if there isn't a builtin mechanism I'd like to provide my homeManager config as an "output" so to say.

I have two systems that run Arch, for which I'd like to use my HM config. Using the HM config for nixos systems already works :)

[arnarg]

@mainrs I just added this nilla module to my work in progress move to nilla: https://github.com/arnarg/config/blob/ec99138f80bed4df338938ab65ea0c50e4680591/nilla/home.nix

With this module you can use it like so:

# Build the home-manager configuration
nix build -f nilla.nix 'systems.home."<user>@<hostname>".result.config.home.activationPackage'
# Activate the generation
./result/activate

I'm also working on a cli inspired by nh but for nilla, called lila. You can already enter a shell, build a package and do build, switch, test and boot with nixos systems. Next on the agenda is to add this home system support.

This is in no way intended to compete with the official nilla cli, I just prefer having a one well integrated cli for everything and it's fun to implement 😆 Once nilla cli is in a more complete state I might not want to work on it anymore.

[mainrs]

Thank you! That helps out a lot! So it's basically a home manager configuration disguised as a normal system configuration :D

Now I'm curious how the "normal" homeConfigurations flake output works....

[arnarg]

So this is only slightly modified from https://github.com/nilla-nix/nixos/blob/main/modules/nixos.nix but set up to use home-manager instead. I couldn't find a super quick way yet to pass the pkgs lib to the default.nix in home-manager so it's being loaded from <nixpkgs> and that does require your $NIX_PATH to be set up properly. I was in a "let's get this working ASAP" mode so I'll try to make this nicer in the future.

But depending on something implemented in my random config repo might not be best and hopefully there will be something like nilla-nix/nixos but for home-manager in the future.

To answer your other question, the outputs in flakes and nilla are just arbitrary attribute sets (although nilla requires them to be set as options, and is therefore typed). As far as flakes is concerned, homeConfigurations is nothing special but the home-manager cli looks at that one attribute for home-manager configurations. Same for nilla here, I just chose to have them available under systems.home."<user>@<hostname>".result, the config.home.activationPackage part is part of the result of homeManagerConfiguration function in home-manager's lib.

[arnarg]

To not potentially divide the ecosystem before there even is one, I have decided to instead make nilla-utils which provides the nilla modules I had implemented in my own configuration (adding nixos and home support) and lila's os and home sub-commands as nilla cli plugins.

I'm closing this issue as I don't think it's relevant anymore.

[jakehamilton]

@arnarg this is awesome!! Would it be okay if I linked to your nilla-utils project?

[arnarg]

@jakehamilton Yeah go for it! 😄