Posts

TIL: How to Start Gnome Wayland Session From TTY Recently, I moved to Hyprland on Ubuntu. I wanted to start gnome in another TTY (teletype). It was more effort to find than I expected: # Go to teletype CTRL+ALT+1 dbus-run-session -- gnome-shell --display-server --wayland That’s it, short and sweet, this post! You now started gnome in a Wayland session.

Background Recently, I proceeded to experiment with some Raspberry PIs (RPI) that I had lying around. I wanted to do something with them, so I decided I would turn them into a k8s cluster and put various random tools that might be nice to have on it. Such as a GitLab runner, Jellyfin media server & pi hole for ad blocking. Hardware The list below shows the things I used to set up my rpi cluster. None of this is sponsored! I paid for everything listed below: ...

TIL: How to Debug a Test in Golang With Build Tags in Neovim I was having issues with my debugger today (well technically yesterday because I am publishing this a day later to spread out my blog posts but same difference) and it took me a few hours to realise what was going on. In my case, I was trying to debug a test written in Golang using nvim-dap-go on Neovim. ...

Preamble Now we have looked at our choice of hardware, which OS to use and specifically, how to configure NixOS (at a high-level), using a git repository. In this part, we will go over which window manager to use. There are two main types we could use here. Either a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. Which comes with batteries included, it provides us with everything we need and we don’t need to configure much to get stuff working. Things like a notification daemon, polkit (for auth). ...

TIL: How to Install Neovim Nightly Using Nix Home Manager (and NixVim) Recently, I wanted to install the nightly version of Neovim (version 0.10) because it supports inlay hints. However, on nixpkgs the latest version of Neovim as of writing is 0.9.4. So how can we get the nightly release? Using nix/home-manager. Simple, we can use an overlay that will add the Neovim nightly package with the nightly. Assuming we are using nix flakes. ...

TIL: How to Set Network Manager Priority to Use Wired Connection Over Wi-Fi If you use network manager on Linux and have both Wi-Fi and wired connection. You may want to prefer using a wired connection over Wi-Fi, due to stability. To do open the nm-connection-editor, if you are using Nix, you can download it from nixpkgs like usual. Higher number means higher priority. So for our wired connection I set the priority to 100 (it was previously -1) and then for our Wi-Fi connection I set the priority to 1. ...

In this post, I will show you how you can take some JSON and convert it into a Nix attribute set. This was particularly useful when I was creating my waybar configuration. Which is usually in JSON, but defined in my home-manager Nix config it has to be in nixlang. So given this: "custom/notification": { "tooltip": false, "format": "{icon}", "format-icons": { "notification": "<span foreground='red'>^</span>", "none": "", "dnd-notification": "<span foreground='red'>^</span>", "dnd-none": "", "inhibited-notification": "<span foreground='red'>^</span>", "inhibited-none": "", "dnd-inhibited-notification": "<span foreground='red'>^</span>", "dnd-inhibited-none": "" }, "return-type": "json", "exec-if": "which swaync-client", "exec": "swaync-client -swb", "on-click": "swaync-client -t -sw", "on-click-right": "swaync-client -d -sw", "escape": true }, We want it to look something like: ...

I have made an post in the past about how you can set up Atuin to sync share history across multiple devices. Whilst this works great and does the job, fish shell doesn’t have the same history that Atuin does. Sometimes we want to have better suggestions in Fish. For example, when you start to type fish shell will suggest the last command in your history that best matches what you are typing (see example below). ...

TIL: How to Use Clipboard Data as File Input in Bash Recently, I wanted to run a bash script where it needed to receive a JSON file as input. However, the JSON I had was taken from somewhere on the internet. In this case, it was taking a JSON blob and converting it to a nix attribute set. However, I didn’t want to save the contents to a file beforehand. ...

As you may know, I have been using Nix/NixOS for the last few months. I finally started doing some development, after spending lots and lots and lots of time tweaking my setup (and neovim). As part of starting to do some real development work, I am now trying to leverage devshells with Nix flakes. I like the concept of Nix devshells, I have tried using Docker dev containers in the past, but the issue I had with those was adding my tools such as shell (fish) or cli tools was not easy. Whereas Nix shells just add tools and scripts to our existing shell. ...

Premable In this second part of the series, we will look at how we can not set up NixOS past installation. How we can install software and various other tools. After part 1 we should have NixOS installed, mind you since I’ve written that blog post I found a way to create a custom ISO image from my Nix config. This ISO contains a custom install script, the main advantage being able to use a tool called disko to partition our disks. Anyway, I will probably write another post in the future going over how you can do this in another blog post. ...

TIL: How to Fix Networking Issues in a Libvirt VM and Mullvad VPN Recently, I was trying to run a libvirt virtual machine, created using virt-manager. The VM was running NixOS and somehow no matter what I did it would not connect to the internet. I was running Mullvad as my VPN, and it turned out this was the app causing issues, I had to turn on Local network share 1. Like in the photo below: ...

TIL: How to Disable Linters in Golangci Lint for Test Files Today (for once), I ran golangci-lint run and it failed on CI with the following error: internal/options/parser_test.go:13: Function 'TestParse' is too long (69 > 60) (funlen) func TestParse(t *testing.T) { task: Failed to run task "lint": exit status 1 Where my .golangci.yml file looked like this: run: timeout: 5m skip-dirs: - direnv linters: enable: - bodyclose - dogsled - dupl - errcheck - exportloopref - funlen - gochecknoinits - goconst - gocritic - gocyclo - gofmt - goimports - gomnd - goprintffuncname - gosec - gosimple - govet - ineffassign - lll - misspell - nakedret - noctx - nolintlint - revive - staticcheck - stylecheck - typecheck - unconvert - unparam - unused - whitespace So basically we want the ability to turn off funlen for our tests (and other linters). Because we don’t mind if some of our test functions get a big long with different sub-tests. ...

I recently learnt in home-manager (Nix) you can run systemd services as your own user. This is nice because we don’t need “sudo” permissions to do so. I also prefer to have as much of my config as possible in home-manager, again I don’t need to run “sudo”. Which is probably safer running apps in the least privileged mode. In my case, I wanted to run an attic, a binary cache, watch store command which uploads any changes to /nix/store to my binary cache. Previously I had this running as a systemd service running as root i.e. managed my NixOS. However, I wanted to run the same service, on my non-NixOS machine. So I decided to have a look and see if I could run it in my home-manager config so I could run it the same way across all my machines. Whilst researching I came across the systemd.user.services option which allows us to do exactly this. ...

TIL: How to Colour Dap Breakpointed Line in Neovim I wanted to change the background colour of the line when it was stopped during debugging using DAP with neovim. To make it easier to see where we are currently breakpointed. We already have a highlight group called DapStopped. Which in my case is defined as: DapStopped = { bg = C.grey }. Then we need to assign the custom highlight group, the key bit being linehl for our use case. ...

TIL: How to Fix Package Binary Collisions on Nix Recently I wanted to use GNU parallel, a nifty little tool we can use to run tasks in parallel, shock horror I know. I already have the moreutils package installed using nix (home-manager). So I added this: home.packages = with pkgs; [ parallel moreutils ] Then I ran the home manager switch like usual, I got the following error. error: builder for '/nix/store/vh6i81xhf6pvybdpall8z8l8y0i6mr8p-home-manager-path.drv' failed with exit code 25; last 1 log lines: > error: collision between `/nix/store/slkylri9sbn4w7paaixzc5wj6cwfk83m-moreutils-0.67/bin/parallel' and `/nix/store/fjpnw99zvx2f910s016jrmybc5jxirpn-parallel-20230822/bin/parallel' For full logs, run 'nix log /nix/store/vh6i81xhf6pvybdpall8z8l8y0i6mr8p-home-manager-path.drv'. error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/m4p56x5lgjfpvdy0xjrbk981sfchpl8c-home-manager-generation.drv' failed to build Because moreutils also have a binary called parallel. How do we tell Nix to overwrite the moreutils binary and use the one in the parallel packages? Simple by using lib.hiPrio like so: ...

Introduction Typically when we want to install a new OS we use an ISO to create a bootable USB drive. We can then plug this into our device, say laptop, and boot from that USB and install our OS. However, typically you can only put a single ISO on a USB. So what if wanted a USB with say Window, Arch Linux, TailsOS and NixOS how could we do that? ...

TIL: How to Use fzf.fish History Search I use Fish Shell with fzf and fish fzf plugin. I installed fzf using nix and home-manager: { programs.fzf = { enable = true; enableFishIntegration = false; }; } It adds fzf-history-widget script, which is bound to ctrl+r, shell reverse history search. Which we can see when we run this: bind | grep -e fzf-history-widget -e fzf-file-widget Whereas I wanted to use the _fzf_search_history which is made available by that fish fzf plugin. Now PatrickF1 recommends running the uninstaller script from fzf, but I found another way we can overwrite the binding by adding the following lines to our fish.config: ...

In this post, we will just go over the basics of how we can configure our setup using a git repo, nix flakes and home-manager. I will go over how I structured my nix config. Not an in-depth tutorial Note this will not be an in-depth guide into NixOS/Home Manager itself. That could well be a series on its own. We will just go over the main ways I configure NixOS/Nix and why I do it the way I do. I recommend doing some reading and playing around and figuring out what works for you 😄 Introduction We will be using two different ways to configure our system, NixOS via a configuration.nix to configure the machine itself. Which includes partitions, backups, docker anything that needs to be run system-wide. Anything that needs “sudo” permissions is configured via this expression. Note we will of course split our nix expressions into smaller modules. That will be re-used between multiple hosts. ...

TIL: How to Check if Another Option Is Set in Home Manager (Nix) Recently I was adding sway to my nix config (setup via home-manager). I already had Hyprland config, I wanted both sway and Hyprland to use my waybar config with some slight differences. So basically I want to check if the current host machine is using Sway or Hyprland (I am assuming we will only use one). The main reason for using Sway is my work laptop uses Ubuntu 22.04, It’s not easy to run Hyprland on a “stable” distro like Ubuntu better suited to Arch or NixOS. ...

TIL: How to Access System in Home Manager Using Flakes Recently I needed to install devenv using flakes in home-manager. One of the things I needed to pass to was the type of system to install on i.e. "x86_64-linux". So as I temp hack I had something like: inputs.devenv.packages."x86_64-linux".devenv. However I was able to access the system using the pkgs attribute like so: { inputs, pkgs, ... }: { home.packages = [ inputs.devenv.packages."${pkgs.system}".devenv ]; } Where my flake.nix looks something like: ...

TIL: How to Fix tmux-resurrect on NixOS When I moved to NixOS I noticed that tmux-resurrect stop restoring some applications such as man and nvim. Like it used to on my Arch machine. I recently found a solution to my problem (thanks to a lovely chap on the nixos discourse). By adding the following lines to our tmux config: resurrect_dir="$HOME/.tmux/resurrect" set -g @resurrect-dir $resurrect_dir set -g @resurrect-hook-post-save-all 'target=$(readlink -f $resurrect_dir/last); sed "s| --cmd .*-vim-pack-dir||g; s|/etc/profiles/per-user/$USER/bin/||g; s|/home/$USER/.nix-profile/bin/||g" $target | sponge $target' What this does is it edits the tmux-resurrect file from this: ...

In this post, I will go over how you can use Cachix’s devenv tool to help create/set up consistent repeatable developer environments. You could use nix flakes if you wanted to as well, without needing another tool. However, I like how devenv provides a few other “tools” within that we can set up from a single devenv.nix file. Such as pre-commit hooks, container support etc. This blog leverages devenv to create/set up its developer environment. ...

TIL: How to Colour Neovim Line Numbers Recently I was trying to configure my own neovim config. I wanted the current line I was onto be coloured slighty differently and also the line number to be white. So it’s easier to see the line number and which line I was on. It was not immediately obvious how to do this and took me long to work out than I’d like to admit 😅. ...

In this article, we will go over how we can self-host our instance of Atuin. A tool we can use to sync our shell history across multiple devices. In the previous article, I showed how you can use the official server. However you may want to run your self-hosted one, so no one can access even the encrypted version of your shell history. We will deploy our instance to fly.io. Why fly.io, its pretty easy to deploy they have a great CLI tool. Also we can get a Postgres database deployed, which we need with Atuin. ...