NixOS Config

Overview

These are the NixOS config and other dotfiles I run on both my desktop and Framework laptop.

This repository is set up such that there's one collection of files that are shared across machines as-is, and a collection that are specific to each machine. For example, my keyboard shortcut prefix is slightly different on my laptop and desktop, since I use a kinesis keyboard on my desktop.

The way this works is that everything under ./etc/** in this repository will get symlinked on the machine at /etc/**, ./home/** to /home/**, etc. Then, laptop and desktop are for platform-specific files - so if I'm running on desktop, it would link ./desktop/etc/** to /etc/** and so on.

Most important files

My NixOS and XMonad files are below - the way they generally work is both the shared and platform-specific files get symlinked into the same directory so they can reference each other.

For the NixOS config, my main one is shared and it imports machine-config.nix which may be symlinked to the laptop or desktop version.

• main shared config is at etc/nixos/configuration.nix
• desktop nixos module desktop/etc/nixos/machine-config.nix
• laptop nixos module laptop/etc/nixos/machine-config.nix

For my XMonad config, I actually define the main method in my platform-specific file, and then import the ./lib/SharedConfig file in each of them. This way I have full control over what parts of the shared config I pull in for i.e. keyboard shortcuts.

• shared XMonad config home/david/.xmonad/lib/SharedConfig.hs
• desktop XMonad main desktop/home/david/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

Usage

I assume you already have NixOS installed to begin with.

Linking files

./link_files <platform>

The first time you pull this repository, you want to symlink all of your dotfiles to point to files in this repository. You do that by running the above command where platform can be laptop or desktop. This may ask for your sudo password to link paths that are owned by root (usually paths in /etc/nixos).

Updating nixos

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

After changing your configuration, run the above command to apply all the changes to your system to match /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. After doing this, you may want to reboot your computer so that various systemd services are started properly.