TIL: How to Set the Path Variable When Using Ubuntu With Nix (Home Manager)
As per some of my recent articles, you will be aware I am using Hyprland (tiling manager) on Ubuntu and managing the
config using nix (home-manager). I was having issues where for some reason it wouldn’t set the PATH variable correctly.
On my NixOS machine, the following would be fine:
bind=,XF86AudioRaiseVolume,exec, volume --inc
bind=,XF86AudioLowerVolume,exec, volume --dec
However, on Ubuntu I needed to provide the full path:
bind=,XF86AudioRaiseVolume,exec, ${volume}/bin/volume --inc
So in the Hyprland config it would look like:
bind=,XF86AudioRaiseVolume,exec, /nix/store/q1wm84g65smaq4agq7zp40q57x3534ni-volume/bin/volume --inc
It was because the session was being started by GDM (gnome), and the PATH variable was not being set properly.
In Wayland GDM picks up environment variables from ~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf 1 so we can add it here.
❯ bat ~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf --plain
PATH="$PATH:/home/haseebmajid/.nix-profile/bin"
Replace haseebmajid with your username (or I guess $HOME should work). This means when we run scripts now, it will
source them from this nix-profile folder. Where the binaries get symlinked, including the volume script above. So
now you don’t need to specify the full path (though maybe you should 🤷)