I've set up my new M1 MacBook Pro using Nix and it's been going relatively well. Home Manager manages global tooling like Neovim, random CLI tools, and config files while I've set up `default.nix` files to use with `nix-shell` per-project. The set up of each project can be a little tedious as I still find the language confusing but once everything is set up the reliable re-creation is excellent. I love the feeling of opening the nix shell and feeling like I have each tool I need for that project without worry of polluting my user space or conflicts between projects.
I recommend also using direnv, with nix-direnv (home-manager has a setting to trivially enable nix-direnv). This lets you integrate your shell.nix environment into your existing shell without having to run `nix-shell` or use bash.
Oh wow, this is fantastic! Thanks for the tip and I'd like to thank you for all of the work you do on nix + Darwin. I'm using your `nix-env.fish` package and it's made things much easier than when I tried this setup a few years ago.
I'm glad to hear it! Though these days I don't actually use it at all, I finally switched to using nix-darwin[1] which means I get a NixOS-like fish initialization. Also prior to that I got the fish package updated with a new override option fishEnvPreInit that lets you write an overlay like
self: super {
fish = super.fish.override {
fishEnvPreinit = sourceBash: sourceBash "${self.nix}/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh";
];
}
This would source the given bash script (using fenv IIRC) at the same point that NixOS fish would load its environment, thus producing the same behavior (notably, setting up all of the various directories prior to running any user code, unlike nix-env.fish that has to try and patch things up after the fact). The downside is that it means you have to recompile fish.
My MBP left Shenzen early this morning and I'm super interested in details of how you did this. Are there any examples of doing this that you followed or recommend? Ansible is more my tooling of choice, though I'm fascinated by Nix, but I wasn't sure even how to get started with using Ansible to set up the Mac.
I just watched this Jeff Geerling video about setting up his M1 Macs using Ansible and his provided playbooks. That's probably the direction I'll end up going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VhPVu5EK5o
I have a Makefile that I use when I need to spin up a new laptop [1]. For your description it sounds like it is functionally similar. What does nix bring that a Makefile like this one doesn’t?
Drift. Nix (effectively) does not mutate in-place, it rebuilds and links. Delete a target from that Makefile and it doesn’t actually remove that thing. It’s the same problem Ansible etc. have. It’s not till actually fully reinstalling the OS that all the implicit dependencies reveal themselves. Sure one can write “clean” targets but the point of Nix is that such manual management is unneeded.
piping the output of a curl command to sh without first checking the sha256 of the file you just got?
In a similar situation I would not be comfortable without at least getting a specific version of the tool I'm downloading and then hardcoding an hash of its content I computed after manually downloading and inspecting its content.
Your Makefile is not a reproducible build. You would need to pin all the versions of the tools being used. Also as others have mentioned, Nix ensures that you do not rely on unspecified dependencies.
