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Luca

Nix, the functional package manager

· (nix home-manager)

Why should you care?

I recently had to restore my Mac, as I covered in my previous blog post. I have now experienced what it is to start from scratch and have a software configure your new OS.

It was liberating to think that next time it would take me less than an hour to get up to speed. This is called having a portable configuration. Of course, the solution I described was not portable, actually limited to macOS.

I spent the past week or so learning about Nix. Nix is a functional package manager that takes the concept of portable configuration to its furthest point. In NixOS you can declare your whole system configuration, including hardware (eg. audio and display drivers).

It is the oldest story in the world, it is what the .emacs allows the Emacs user to do. Declare the needed packages and how you want them configured, bring your configuration with you forever. nix extends this power to the entire computing environment.

My objective was to declare the fundamental building blocks of my workflow:

  • CLI packages (kubectl, python, poetry, etc.)
  • GUI apps (Dropbox, 1Password, Slack, etc.)
  • zsh (oh-my-zsh, plugins, theme, etc.)
  • emacs (gccemacs and ~/.doom.d/)
  • Dotfiles (e.g. ~/.kube/config, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, …)

Installing Nix

If you are on macOS, there are very high chances you are using brew. It is stable, user friendly, basically all packages are available.

Well, nix is far from that user experience. I found its documentation quite difficult. The installation process was hard. There are not so many examples online you can learn from.

Let me now give you the good news. As it is common with software that is difficult to tame.. it is totally worth it.

When you get a stable installation and you climb the first part of the steep learning curve.. it is impossible to come back. Like Emacs.

So, with a good dose of patience follow my tutorial.

Create the nix volume

If you have the latest macOS Catalina, we will need to create a volume where nix will download packages and build our environment. A very cool feature is that we will be able to roll-back to previous "generations" of our environment.

We will issue a few commands at the terminal. We are not doing anything dramatic and if something goes wrong we can easily delete the volume with Disk Utility and start the process from the beginning. For reference, I followed this and this blog posts.

First we create the volume with the diskutil program:

sudo diskutil apfs addVolume disk1 ‘APFS’ nix

Then we need to ask diskutil for the UUID of our volume:

diskutil info /dev/disk1s6 | grep UUID

Let's copy that information and paste it in the below command:

echo "UUID=12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789123 /nix apfs  rw" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Finally, let's edit the /etc/synthetic.conf file:

echo 'nix' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf

and restart.

Iinstall nix

After the restart, we can set the volume as read-only:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /nix

And install nix: z

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume --daemon

The installer is pretty straightforward. To test that the installation went through, try a nix-shell command:

nix-shell -p ripgrep

If everything went well, congratulations! Else, head over to the Troubleshooting section.

Install nix-darwin

In order for nix to control some of the system services of macOS, we need to install nix-darwin.

nix-build https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/archive/master.tar.gz -A installer

And execute the built installer:

./result/bin/darwin-installer

Finally, let's add the nixpkgs channel:

sudo -i nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-20.09-darwin nixpkgs
sudo -i nix-channel --update nixpkgs

A channel is simply a repository where nix will look for downloads. Here you can find the repository with the "recipe" for all the packages. Once you gained confidence with the nix language, it is easy to write a recipe for a package and contribute it to the community.

Troubleshooting

Skip this section if you installed successfully.

In case the nix commands are not available to your path:

  • First check that source ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh is in your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
  • Next, check that your .nix-profile is populated.

In my case, it was empty and I had to create the symlink myself with:

ln -s /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin .nix-profile

And then switching profile:

nix-env --switch-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/profile

I faced another couple of misteryous errors when installing nix-darwin, solved by exporting environment variables as indicated in some remote github issues. Export them and run the commands again:

export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE="/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt"
export NIX_PATH=~/.nix-defexpr/channels:$NIX_PATH

Home Manager

Alright, the complicated part is behind us. We have just opened the door to new cool functional workflows.

The nix ecosystem is rich and complex. I started with a package which aims to simplify "home" configuration. It is called Home Manager.

I recommend to start by cloning this repository. It contains a great template that you can start customizing right away.

The main thing to consider is the home.nix file:

{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  home.username = "$USER";
  home.homeDirectory = "$HOME";
  home.stateVersion = "20.09";
  #
  programs.bash = {
    enable = true;
  };
  home.packages = [
    pkgs.htop
    pkgs.fortune
  ];
}

Start by inserting your username and home directory.

Now you can run the helper commands available in the repo: z

./update-dependencies.sh
./switch.sh

When the process completes, start a new shell. If you didn't have it before, you have installed htop and can use it in your terminal.

It also installed another bash executable. You can see all executables with which -a: z

~ ❯ which -a bash
/Users/luca/.nix-profile/bin/bash
/run/current-system/sw/bin/bash
/bin/bash

When you ran switch, nix downloaded the declared packages and symlinked the executables in your ~/.nix-profile folder. nix will simply add the packages to your PATH and it will not break your existing installation.

This is great because you can slowly migrate your brew packages. And if something goes wrong, you can rollback to the previously built configuration with:

nix-env --rollback

In fact, I accepted that on macOS my home-manager configuration will live algonside a Brewfile to install GUI apps (brew cask is much more stable and furnished). Restoring my system will just amount to:

./update-dependencies.sh
./switch.sh
# install brew
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew bundle

and this is an extract of my Brewfile:

# Taps
tap "homebrew/cask"
tap "homebrew/cask-versions"
tap "homebrew/core"
# Not available on nixpkgs
brew "azure-cli"
brew "parquet-tool"
brew "mas"
# GUI apps
cask "1password6"
cask "discord"
# ...

Next steps

In this short post I tried to keep things simple. There is a lot to explore in the ecosystem.

Some of the great tools to learn about:

  • nix-shell allows you to spawn a shell with declared dependencies. Think one shell for building a LaTeX document. Another shell for a python project. You can avoid polluting your system and achieve stable, portable, sharable environments.
  • The logical follower is nix-build, which allows you to package your python project easily.
  • We have seen nix-env in action with home-manager. It is used for managing system configuration.

I will just end with a link to my personal nixpkgs repo which holds my home configuration.