tag:Nix

Background So I have a small home lab, where I have a few random things running, like a GitLab CI runner, a media server etc. All my home lab servers (3 of them) are running NixOS and are defined within my Nix flake what services they run. For example: https://gitlab.com/hmajid2301/nixicle/-/blob/main/systems/x86_64-linux/ms01/default.nix?ref_type=heads They are set up using nixos-anywhere like most of my other services. Then using deploy-rs we can ssh onto our home lab servers and deploy nix config, i.e. updating packages. ...

If you read this post, I finally managed to figure out how to get shell completions in fish shell when you install a tool using a devshell in Nix, while using direnv. This plugin makes sure that the fish shell completions get resynced. Currently, I am using a fork of the original plugin, as the fish shell v4 broke it but eventually can use the original. How it works: Fish will search $fish_complete_path dynamically, so the idea is to implement a function which listens for changes to $XDG_DATA_DIRS, and attempts to keep that in sync with $fish_complete_path. ...

Recently, I have been building an app (https://voxicle.app #ShamelessPlug), with tailwind and DaisyUI. I have been having issues getting the tailwind LSP to work nicely in Neovim, and only recently managed to make it work. So in this article, I will go over how I set up, assuming you are using Nix as a package manager. Why Nix? In my project, it is a go web app, so all the dependencies in the project are managed as go modules by my go.mod file. Then everything else the developer needs is set up as a dev shell. Things like the standalone tailwind CLI, I am using a nix flake which already has DaisyUI built in so it can also generate those types i.e. btn in the final styles.css (or whatever you called it). The flake is here: https://github.com/aabccd021/tailwindcss-daisyui-nix ...

I use Nix mainly with home manager on my Ubuntu laptop, and for the most part, it works fine. However, some apps installed using Nix, need to use nixGL. A wrapper tool for OpenGL, allowing Nix installed tooling to use the system’s OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. Some apps including kitty and Firefox (mainly for Google Meet). There is currently a branch in home-manager we can pull into our config, which provides a convenient way to wrap these apps in nixGL rather than needing to specify say nixGLIntel kitty in our terminal or say Hyprland config (key bindings). ...

TIL: How to Get Shell Completions in Nix Shell With Direnv When shell completions don’t work with direnv, you may need to use nix develop to load the shell manually. Background I am using nix-direnv, with nix devshell to autoload into my development environments. I changed the directory and the devshell is automagically loaded without me doing anything, which is great. Provides me with a bunch of tools specific for that project. With all the benefits of Nix, mainly reproducibility. ...

Recently, I was trying to configure the terminal emulator Kitty with Nix and Stylix, and I was having issues with it showing emojis. It took me a lot longer to figure out than I would like to admit. So I decided to write a blog post, showing you how I did it and perhaps saving you some time. I did this in my home-manger config. First we install the Symbols Nerd Font, there are two ways we can normally add nerd fonts. Either patch our font, which I had already done with my font Mono Lisa or use this font (symbols), alongside your font (as a fallback). I haven’t fully managed to get that to work on my system, so I have both normal Mono Lisa and Nerd Font variants on my system at the moment. Else other apps besides Kitty break. Anyway, tangent aside, you can install like this: ...

As some of you may know, I moved to Zellij a few months ago from tmux. In this post, I will show you have I configured the zellij status bar in nix. So it acts more like how my config did in tmux. My current Zellij status bar. (Optional) Background A bit of background, which you can skip if you’d like. What is zellij? Some of you may be wondering what is zellij/tmux. They are what we call multiplexers. Essentially, our terminals now can have a client server architecture. So we can kill our terminal but, our session will still be alive. Which makes it great for jumping between projects if you are using say Neovim. When I first moved to tmux, I found it is great because now I don’t need 4/5 VS Code instances open. Instead, I could use a script to jump between my projects, and tmux would keep the session alive, so just how I left the project. Zellij does basically the same thing for me. ...

TIL: How to Pull Submodules in a Nix Derivation Recently, I was trying to create a derivation which needed to pull git submodules as well. I was getting an error which look something like this: data/meson.build:76:0: ERROR: Nonexistent build file 'data/submodules/meson.build' It was coming from this derivation https://gitlab.com/hmajid2301/dotfiles/-/blob/c153de146a3bf9339cbef013ac65bc32e6305c8e/packages/gradience/default.nix for building the latest version of gradience. It turns out when we do a fetchFromGitHub we need to explicitly tell it to also pull submodules, which makes sense. So I was able to fix this. I had to add the fetchSubmodules argument: ...

I wanted to do a short article showing you how you can use your Nix config to install NixOS on a new device. Have your device setup with NixOS in a few commands with all the packages and tooling you want. Previously I was creating my own ISO and then burning that to a USB and using that USB as live media to install my config. I had a custom script nix_installer, which would run automatically when you loaded into the gnome shell. ...

My original plan for this article was to discuss my shell and how I configure it. But I have made some significant changes, to how I structure my Nix configuration and I wanted to go over Why I did that. I mean, likely this will probably happen a lot, as my configuration changes more often than it should 🙈. Anyway, into the main topic. My dotfiles Snowfall what? I recently ported my Nix configuration (dotfiles), to use the snowfall-lib to structure my Nix config. ...

TIL: How to Fix Neorg Metadata Tree Sitter Issues With NixVim If you are like me, you may be configuring your Neovim configuration using NixVim. Which is a “framework” making it easier to configure Neovim using mostly Nix configuration. Allowing us to keep most of our config in one language, at least in my case. I started using Neorg to manage my notes and to-do lists in my “second-brain”, but noticed that the metadata part was not being highlighted as I expected. ...

TIL: How to Set up Layouts in Zellij That Use Direnv and Nix I have been using Zellij for a while now. I tried to set up layouts for one of my personal projects. So that we could have tests and linting running and any other tasks we may want whilst doing development 1. However, I had an issue working out how to call commands that required direnv and nix to set up development environments. In my case, my nix dev shell installed the go-task tool to run tasks such as task lint or task tests. However the shell that zellij was running the commands in for the layout did not load my Nix dev shell, so the go-task binary was not available. ...

TIL: Clean Up Tmux Service When Removed by Home Manager Recently I stopped using tmux to try zellij, however I noticed when I removed tmux from my nix config. I was getting the following error, when rebuilding my home-manager config: The user systemd session is degraded: UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION ● tmux.service loaded failed failed tmux default session (detached) Legend: LOAD → Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded. ACTIVE → The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB. SUB → The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type. I was wondering where this error was coming from, turns it the symlink to tmux.service has not been deleted that nix would create. ...

Recently, I wanted to add a Neovim plugin to nixpkgs, so I can then add it to NixVim. I tried following the guide from the docs. However, I kept getting the following errors: nix-shell -p vimPluginsUpdater --run vim-plugins-updater error: … while calling the 'derivationStrict' builtin at /builtin/derivation.nix:9:12: (source not available) … while evaluating derivation 'shell' whose name attribute is located at /nix/store/whhzjfgalghpm34irclh01c0afynmyll-nixpkgs/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix:300:7 … while evaluating attribute 'buildInputs' of derivation 'shell' at /nix/store/whhzjfgalghpm34irclh01c0afynmyll-nixpkgs/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix:347:7: 346| depsHostHost = lib.elemAt (lib.elemAt dependencies 1) 0; 347| buildInputs = lib.elemAt (lib.elemAt dependencies 1) 1; | ^ 348| depsTargetTarget = lib.elemAt (lib.elemAt dependencies 2) 0; error: undefined variable 'vimPluginsUpdater' at «string»:1:107: 1| {...}@args: with import <nixpkgs> args; (pkgs.runCommandCC or pkgs.runCommand) "shell" { buildInputs = [ (vimPluginsUpdater) ]; } "" Or I was getting 429 network errors, too many requests to GitHub. ...

Introduction In this article, I will go over how to get sops-nix to work properly with home-manager. One issue I noticed was that when I used with home-manager modules/options, I would see a string like “%r/secrets/haseeb/…”. The %r would not be replaced. Relevant Issue: https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix/issues/28 Assumption I will assume you have already setup sops-nix and are using it. In the sense, you have a .sops.yaml file and are already using it with NixOS. The instructions in the README is mostly pretty clear how to get setup, but I may in future create another article how I set up sops-nix. But in this post, we will simply go over how we can make it work with home-manager. I will also assume you are using nix flakes and have passed sops-nix as an input. ...

TIL: How to Append to a Config Option String in Nix Recently on my laptop I had to add some extra config settings to my Hyprland config. Rather than polluting my hyprland.nix file with if, else depending on the host. I wanted to add the extra config in the home.nix of the host. So it’s contained within that host. Where my home.nix is the entry point for my home-manager config for that host. ...

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: ...

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

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 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: ...