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33 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
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# Introduction to Home Manager {#ch-introduction}
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Home Manager is a [Nix](https://nix.dev/)-powered tool for reproducible management of the contents of users' home directories.
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This includes programs, configuration files, environment variables and, well… arbitrary files.
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The following example snippet of Nix code:
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```nix
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programs.git = {
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enable = true;
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userEmail = "joe@example.org";
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userName = "joe";
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};
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```
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would make available to a user the `git` executable and man pages and a configuration file `~/.config/git/config`:
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```ini
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[user]
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email = "joe@example.org"
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name = "joe"
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```
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Since Home Manager is implemented in Nix, it provides several benefits:
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- Contents are reproducible — a home will be the exact same every time it is built, unless of course, an intentional change is made.
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This also means you can have the exact same home on different hosts.
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- Significantly faster and more powerful than various backup strategies.
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- Unlike "dotfiles" repositories, Home Manager supports specifying programs, as well as their configurations.
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- Supported by <http://cache.nixos.org/>, so that you don't have to build from source.
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- If you do want to build some programs from source, there is hardly a tool more useful than Nix for that, and the build instructions can be neatly integrated in your Home Manager usage.
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- Infinitely composable, so that values in different configuration files and build instructions can share a source of truth.
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- Connects you with the [most extensive](https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total) and [most up-to-date](https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest) software package repository on earth, [Nixpkgs](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs).
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