4.4 KiB
Hosts
Module declarations dependant on particular machines should be stored in the
hosts directory. Every file in this directory will be added automatically
to the the nixosConfigurations
flake output and thus becomes deployable via
nixos-rebuild
and flk
.
See hosts/default.nix
for the implementation.
Profiles
A profile is any directory under profiles containing a default.nix
defining a function that returns a valid NixOS module, with the added restriction
that no new declarations to the options
or config
attributes are allowed
(use modules instead). Their purpose is to provide abstract
expressions suitable for reuse by multiple deployments. They are perhaps the
key mechanism by which we keep this repo maintainable.
Profiles can have subprofiles which are themselves just profiles that live under
another. There's no hard rule that everything in the folder must be imported by
its default.nix
, so you can also store relevant code that is useful but not
wanted by default in, say, an alt.nix
. Importantly, every subdirectory in a
profile should be independent of its parent. i.e:
{
# importing `profile` without implicitly importing `some`
imports = [ ./profiles/some/profile ];
}
It is okay for profiles to depend on other profiles so long as they are
explicitly loaded via imports
.
Suites
Suites are simple collections of profiles that can be directly imported from any host like so:
{ suites, ... }:
{
imports = suites.mySuite;
}
You can declare any combination of users and profiles that you wish, providing a nice abstraction, free from the idiosyncratic concerns of specific hardware.
Users
User declarations belong in the users
directory.
These are actually just a special case of profiles attached to
a particular interactive user. Its primarily for declarations to
users.users.<new-user>
where <new-user>.isNormalUser
is true.
This is a convenient place to import your profiles such that a particular user always has a reliable stack. Also user profiles are available to create reusable configs across different users.
For convenience, home-manager is available automatically for home directory setup and should only be used from this directory.
Secrets
Anything you wish to keep encrypted goes in the secrets
directory, which is
created on first entering a nix-shell
.
Be sure to run git crypt init
, before committing anything to this directory.
Be sure to check out git-crypt's documentation
if your not familiar. The filter is already set up to encrypt everything in this
folder by default.
To keep profiles reusable across configurations, secrets should
only be imported from the users
or hosts
directory.
Cachix
When using:
cachix use <your-cachix>
A file with be created in /etc/nixos/cachix/your-cachix.nix
. Simply add this
file to git, and it will be exported so others can use your binary cache
directly from this flake via nixosModules.cachix.<your-cachix>
.
Modules, Packages and Overlays
All expressions in both modules/list.nix and
pkgs/default.nix are available globally, anywhere else in the
repo. They are additionally included in the nixosModules
and overlay
flake
outputs, respectively. Packages are automatically included in the packages
output as well.
The directory structure is identical to nixpkgs to provide a kind of staging area
for any modules or packages we might be wanting to merge there later. If your not
familiar or can't be bothered, simply dropping a valid nix file and pointing the
default.nix
to it, is all that's really required.
As for overlays, they should be defined in the overlays directory.
They will be automatically pulled in for use by all configurations. Nix command
line tools will be able to read overlays from here as well since it is set as
nixpkgs-overlays
in NIX_PATH
. And of course they will be exported via the
flake output overlays
as well.
If you wish to use an overlay from an external flake, simply add it to the
externOverlays
list in the let
block of the outputs
attribute in
flake.nix. Same for external modules, add them to externModules
.