mirror of https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager.git synced 2024-12-14 11:57:55 +00:00

Robert Helgesson 4aa9eb327d

WIP home-manager: avoid profile management during activation

This commit deprecates profile management from the activation script.
The profile management is instead the responsibility of the driving
software, for example, the `home-manager` tool in the case of
standalone installs.

The legacy behavior is still available for backwards compatibility but
may be removed in the future.

The new behavior resolves (or moves us closer to resolving) a number
of long standing open issues:

- `home-manager switch --rollback`, which performs a rollback to the
  previous Home Manager generation before activating. While it was
  previously possible to accomplish this by activating an old
  generation, it did always create a new profile generation.

  This option has been implemented as part of this commit.

- `home-manager switch --test`, which activates the configuration but
  does not create a new profile generation.

  This option has _not_ been implemented here since it relies on the
  current configuration being activated on login, which we do not
  currently do.

- When using the "Home Manager as a NixOS module" installation method
  we previously created an odd `home-manager` per-user "shadow
  profile" for the user. This is no longer necessary.

  This has been implemented as part of this commit.

Fixes #3450

2024-06-22 15:15:55 +02:00

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Home Manager using Nix

This project provides a basic system for managing a user environment using the Nix package manager together with the Nix libraries found in Nixpkgs. It allows declarative configuration of user specific (non-global) packages and dotfiles.

Usage

Before attempting to use Home Manager please read the warning below.

For a systematic overview of Home Manager and its available options, please see:

If you would like to contribute to Home Manager, then please have a look at "Contributing" in the manual.

Releases

Home Manager is developed against nixpkgs-unstable branch, which often causes it to contain tweaks for changes/packages not yet released in stable NixOS. To avoid breaking users' configurations, Home Manager is released in branches corresponding to NixOS releases (e.g. release-24.05). These branches get fixes, but usually not new modules. If you need a module to be backported, then feel free to open an issue.

Words of warning

Unfortunately, it is quite possible to get difficult to understand errors when working with Home Manager. You should therefore be comfortable using the Nix language and the various tools in the Nix ecosystem.

If you are not very familiar with Nix but still want to use Home Manager then you are strongly encouraged to start with a small and very simple configuration and gradually make it more elaborate as you learn.

In some cases Home Manager cannot detect whether it will overwrite a previous manual configuration. For example, the Gnome Terminal module will write to your dconf store and cannot tell whether a configuration that it is about to be overwritten was from a previous Home Manager generation or from manual configuration.

Home Manager targets NixOS unstable and NixOS version 24.05 (the current stable version), it may or may not work on other Linux distributions and NixOS versions.

Now when your expectations have been built up and you are eager to try all this out you can go ahead and read the rest of this text.

Contact

You can chat with us on IRC in the channel #home-manager on OFTC. There is also a Matrix room, which is bridged to the IRC channel.

Installation

Home Manager can be used in three primary ways:

Using the standalone home-manager tool. For platforms other than NixOS and Darwin, this is the only available choice. It is also recommended for people on NixOS or Darwin that want to manage their home directory independently of the system as a whole. See "Standalone installation" in the manual for instructions on how to perform this installation.
As a module within a NixOS system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running nixos-rebuild. See "NixOS module" in the manual for a description of this setup.
As a module within a nix-darwin system configuration. This allows the user profiles to be built together with the system when running darwin-rebuild. See "nix-darwin module" in the manual for a description of this setup.

Home Manager provides both the channel-based setup and the flake-based one. See Nix Flakes for a description of the flake-based setup.

Translations

Home Manager has basic support for internationalization through gettext. The translations are hosted by Weblate. If you would like to contribute to the translation effort then start by going to the Home Manager Weblate project.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.

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