Home Manager using Nix

This project provides a basic system for managing a user environment
using the Nix package manager together with the Nix libraries
found in Nixpkgs. It allows declarative configuration of user
specific (non global) packages and dotfiles.

Usage

Before attempting to use Home Manager please read the warning below.

For a systematic overview of Home Manager and its available options,
please see

the Home Manager manual,
the Home Manager configuration options, and
the 3rd party Home Manager option search.

If you would like to contribute to Home Manager
then please have a look at the contributing chapter of the manual.

Releases

Home Manager is developed against nixpkgs-unstable branch, which
often causes it to contain tweaks for changes/packages not yet
released in stable NixOS. To avoid breaking users' configurations,
Home Manager is released in branches corresponding to NixOS releases
(e.g. release-23.05). These branches get fixes, but usually not new
modules. If you need a module to be backported, then feel free to open
an issue.

Words of warning

Unfortunately, it is quite possible to get difficult to understand
errors when working with Home Manager, such as infinite loops with no
clear source reference. You should therefore be comfortable using the
Nix language and the various tools in the Nix ecosystem. Reading
through the Nix Pills document is a good way to familiarize
yourself with them.

If you are not very familiar with Nix but still want to use Home
Manager then you are strongly encouraged to start with a small and
very simple configuration and gradually make it more elaborate as you
learn.

In some cases Home Manager cannot detect whether it will overwrite a
previous manual configuration. For example, the Gnome Terminal module
will write to your dconf store and cannot tell whether a configuration
that it is about to be overwritten was from a previous Home Manager
generation or from manual configuration.

Home Manager targets NixOS unstable and NixOS version 23.05 (the
current stable version), it may or may not work on other Linux
distributions and NixOS versions.

Also, the home-manager tool does not explicitly support rollbacks at
the moment so if your home directory gets messed up you'll have to fix
it yourself. See the rollbacks section for instructions on how to
manually perform a rollback.

Now when your expectations have been built up and you are eager to try
all this out you can go ahead and read the rest of this text.

Contact

You can chat with us on IRC in the channel #home-manager on OFTC.
There is also a Matrix room,
which is bridged to the IRC channel.

Installation

Home Manager can be used in three primary ways:

Using the standalone 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 independently of the system as a whole. See
Standalone installation in the manual
for instructions on how to perform this installation.
As a module within a NixOS system configuration. This allows the
user profiles to be built together with the system when running
nixos-rebuild. See NixOS module installation in the manual for a description of this setup.
As a module within a nix-darwin system configuration. This
allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when
running darwin-rebuild. See nix-darwin module
installation in the manual for a
description of this setup.

Home Manager provides both the channel-based setup and the flake-based one.
See Nix Flakes for a description of the flake-based setup.

Translations

Home Manager has basic support for internationalization through
gettext. The translations are
hosted by Weblate. If you would like to
contribute to the translation effort then start by going to the
Home Manager Weblate project.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.

will/home-manager