isabel's dotfiles

Foreword

This repository contains my personal configuration for my systems, so its really important that you know it's personal and not everything will fit your needs. Therefore most things will not work out of the box without some changes, so be warned!!!!

What does this repo provided

• Modular configuration, so you can add or remove parts of the configuration
• Sensible defaults, so you can get started quickly
• Docs kind of
• Catppuccin everywhere.

🖥️ Systems

🧩 Modules

• flake - modules which are used to build the flake outputs
• generic - modules which are intended to work with any module system (e.g. home-manager, nix-darwin, etc.)
• nixos - modules which work on NixOS
• base - modules which work on either NixOS or macOS
• darwin - modules which work on macOS
• home - modules which are used to configure home-manager
• iso - modules which are used to build isos
• wsl - modules which work on WSL2

When writing a module, you should follow these guidelines:

• Use a tree like structure for the head lambda args if and only if it is needed.

{
  lib,
  pkgs,
  inputs,
  ...
}:
{
  /* ommitted config */
}

• imports should do its best to avoid going backwards in the flake's file structure.

Despite my best efforts to advice you as to not do this, many of you still choose to do so. So here is a guide on how to make it your own. So maybe consider donating to me before continuing.

donation platforms in order of preference:

• ko-fi
• github sponsors
• liberapay
• patreon

Making it your own

1. There are a number of files you will want to edit but the best place to start would be renaming the isabel user to your own user and deleting the robin user.
3. Following this you will want to edit /modules/base/users/options.nix and change any mentions of isabel to your username.
4. Then you can create a file in that will contain your ssh key /modules/base/users/<user>.nix.
5. Finally you will want to edit /modules/nixos/users/<user>.nix to add your encrypted password, generated with mkpasswd.
7. I host a number off different types of hosts, so there is likely one that will nicely match yours. To check what is a good match for you, look at the hosts table.
8. At this point you should have found the ideal host, so your going to rename the directory that it is into your preferred hostname.
9. Then you should make any needed adjustments. This should include renaming the home-manager users and configuring the options.
10. You will then want to edit modules/nixos/environment/locale.nix such that you have the correct timezone and locale.
11. You likely don't want to use my lix fork, so you should regex replace izlix with your preferred nix implementation. If your preferred nix implementation does not support nested input.follows you will have to edit the flake.nix.
12. There is a lot of maintenance burden in this repository, so you should see what you can remove safely. But there's no safe way to guide you on this so best of luck.

NixOS

You might want to use the lilith iso configuration, provided in this repository

• To build it you can run nix build .#images.lilith.
• Or you can download it from the release page.

If you opted to use the lilith iso image, you can use the iznix-install script to install it on your system. Otherwise, you can follow the steps below.

1. Install NixOS, you might need to follow the manual
2. Clone this repository to ~/.config/flake
3. Run sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/.config/flake#<host>

Dual boot

If you would like to set up duel boot with Windows, you should consider enabling secure boot. To do so you should follow the lanzaboote guide.

1. Locate the Windows EFI partition

lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT

2. Mount the Windows EFI partition

sudo mkdir /mnt/winboot
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/winboot

3. Copy the Windows EFI files to the NixOS EFI partition

sudo rsync -av /mnt/winboot/EFI/Microsoft/ /boot/EFI/Microsoft/

4. Finally, clean up

sudo umount /mnt/winboot
sudo rmdir /mnt/winboot

macOS

1. Install Lix the package manager

curl -sSf -L https://install.lix.systems/lix | sh -s -- install

2. Then enter a nix development shell in order to use git and other required tools

nix develop

3. Now we need to switch to the configuration, remember to replace <host> with the system you are configuring

just provision <host>

In the past this repo used to hold templates. Now the templates are located at tgirlcloud/nix-templates. Overall the commands remain the same except for the repo to use.

• nix flake init -t github:tgirlcloud/nix-templates#<template> to initialize a new project with the template
• nix flake new -t github:tgirlcloud/nix-templates#<template> <out dir> to create a new project in the specified directory

For the full list of templates check the nix-templates repo directory or run nix flake show github:tgirlcloud/nix-templates.

The systems are configured in /systems/<hostname>.

To set up a system configuration it must be declared in /systems/default.nix.

• arch:

  • default: "x86_64"
  • options: "x86_64", "aarch64"

• class:

  • default: "nixos"
  • options: "nixos", "darwin", "iso", "wsl"

• system:

  • default: constructSystem config.easyHosts.hosts.<hostname>.target config.easy-hosts.hosts.<hostname>.arch
  • note: This is a function that constructs the system configuration, it will make x86_64-linux by from the target and arch attributes or aarch64-darwin

• deployable:

  • default: false

• modules:

  • default: "[ ]"
  • options:

• specialArgs:

  • default: "{ }"

The user side is configured in /home/<user>.

To set up a user configuration it must be declared in /modules/base/users/options.nix and /modules/base/users/<user>.nix can be used for anything that is not preconfigured by /modules/base/users/mkusers.nix. You will also want to add a hashed password generated from mkpasswd to /modules/nixos/users/<user>.nix.

You should also add your user into the users.nix file for your system. Whilst following the template:

{
  garden.system = {
    mainUser = "robin";
    users = [ "robin" ];
  };

  # you can add a home-manager configuration here for the user if it needs
  # anything special
  home-manager.users.robin.garden = {};
}

Adding packages to your user or system profile is different then most other flakes. In this flake we use the garden.packages attribute to add our packages, which take an attrset. This prevents us from having duplicate listings of packages, and lets us think a little less when writing home-manger or nixos/darwin module code.

An example of this may look like the following:

{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  garden.packages = {
    inherit (pkgs) git;

    wrapped-nvim = pkgs.symlinkJoin {
      name = "wrapped-nvim";
      paths = [ pkgs.nvim pkgs.astro-language-server ];
    };
  };
}

Sops Nix

We also use sops-nix to manage secrets that are not files. For the most part this will be ssh keys, api keys and other plaintext secrets.

To start you should identify whether you are creating a system level secret or a user level secret.

User secrets

If you are adding a user level secret, you should add your user to the list of users in the .sops.yaml file. Then you should get your public key by running:

ssh-to-age < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Then you can create your users secrets file. To do so you should run the command:

sops secrets/your_username.yaml

Where your_username is your actual username.

System secrets

If you are adding a system level secrets, you should get the hostname and its accompanied public key. To get the public key, you can run:

ssh-keyscan <host> | ssh-to-age

Where <host> is the ip address or hostname of the system you want to add.

Alternatively, if you are on the machine you can run:

ssh-to-age < /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub

Then you can create the system secrets file. To do so you should run the command:

sops secrets/services/<service>.yaml

You should replace <service> with the name of the service you are adding the secrets for.

Rotating secrets

To rotate a secret file all you have to run is:

sops rotate -i secrets/<file>.yaml

Where <file> is the name of the file you want to rotate.

To rotate all the secrets, you can run:

find secrets/ -name "*.yaml" | xargs -I {} sops rotate -i {}

Adding new owners to secrets

To add a new owner to a secret file, you must first add the new recipent to the .sops.yaml file. Then you can run the command:

sops updatekeys secrets/<file>.yaml

Where <file> is the name of the file you want to update.

Futhermore, to batch update all secrets, you can run:

find secrets/ -name "*.yaml" | xargs -I {} sops updatekeys -y {}

To uninstall nix darwin run the following command:

nix run github:LnL7/nix-darwin#darwin-uninstaller

Issues

A awesome list of issues I've had that I want to document for future reference.

chmod nix darwin error

error: chmod '"/nix/store/66kaihiqnn02vpxs6qydcbw9pq7nrkld-iterm2-3.5.4/Applications/iTerm2.app"': Operation not permitted

You can get this error when trying to run nix store gc. The fix for this is to give nix FDA. To do so System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access and add nix to the list of apps that have full disk access.

See also https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6765

I use lix.

This flake makes a point of using lix where possible.

To do so we add the following snippet taken from modules/base/nix/overlays/default.nix. What this does is use lix where possible rather than nix.

_: prev: {
  # in order to reduce our closure size, we can override these packages to
  # use the nix package that we have installed, this will trigget a rebuild
  # of the packages that depend on them so hopefully its worth it for that
  # system space
  nixVersions = prev.nixVersions // {
    stable = config.nix.package;
  };
}

I use fht-compositor as my window manager on linux. On macos I don't use a window manager, but when I do it has to be areospace. This page documents how they are used.

lib.hardware:

lib.hardware.isx86Linux

check if the host platform is linux and x86

Arguments

• [pkgs] the package set

Type

isx86Linux :: AttrSet -> Bool

Example

isx86Linux pkgs
=> true

lib.hardware.primaryMonitor

assume the first monitor in the list of monitors is primary get its name from the list of monitors

Arguments

• [config] the configuration that nixosConfigurations provides

Type

primaryMonitor :: AttrSet -> String

Example

primaryMonitor osConfig
=> "DP-1"

lib.hardware.ldTernary

ldTernary, short for linux darwin ternary

Inputs

• [pkgs] is the package set
• [l] the value to return if the host platform is linux
• [d] the value to return if the host platform is darwin

Type

ldTernary :: AttrSet -> Any -> Any -> Any

Example

ldTernary pkgs "linux" "darwin"
=> "linux"

lib.helpers:

lib.helpers.mkPub

Create a public key for a given host

Arguments

• [host] the host to create the public key for
• [key] this is a attrset with the key type and key

Type

mkPub :: (String -> AttrSet -> AttrSet) -> String -> AttrSet -> AttrSet

Example

mkPub "github.com" {
  type = "rsa";
  key = "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAq2A7hRGmdnm9tUDbO9IDSwBK6TbQa+PXYPCPy6rbTrTtw7PHkccKrpp0yVhp5HdEIcKr6pLlVDBfOLX9QUsyCOV0wzfjIJNlGEYsdlLJizHhbn2mUjvSAHQqZETYP81eFzLQNnPHt4EVVUh7VfDESU84KezmD5QlWpXLmvU31/yMf+Se8xhHTvKSCZIFImWwoG6mbUoWf9nzpIoaSjB+weqqUUmpaaasXVal72J+UX2B+2RPW3RcT0eOzQgqlJL3RKrTJvdsjE3JEAvGq3lGHSZXy28G3skua2SmVi/w4yCE6gbODqnTWlg7+wC604ydGXA8VJiS5ap43JXiUFFAaQ==";
}
=> {
  "github.com-rsa" = {
    hostNames = [ "github.com" ];
    publicKey = "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAq2A7hRGmdnm9tUDbO9IDSwBK6TbQa+PXYPCPy6rbTrTtw7PHkccKrpp0yVhp5HdEIcKr6pLlVDBfOLX9QUsyCOV0wzfjIJNlGEYsdlLJizHhbn2mUjvSAHQqZETYP81eFzLQNnPHt4EVVUh7VfDESU84KezmD5QlWpXLmvU31/yMf+Se8xhHTvKSCZIFImWwoG6mbUoWf9nzpIoaSjB+weqqUUmpaaasXVal72J+UX2B+2RPW3RcT0eOzQgqlJL3RKrTJvdsjE3JEAvGq3lGHSZXy28G3skua2SmVi/w4yCE6gbODqnTWlg7+wC604ydGXA8VJiS5ap43JXiUFFAaQ==";
  };
}

lib.helpers.mkPubs

Create public keys for a given host

Arguments

• [host] the host to create the public keys for
• [keys] the list of keys to create

Type

mkPubs :: (String -> List) -> String -> List -> AttrSet

Example

mkPubs "github.com" [
  {
    type = "rsa";
    key = "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAq2A7hRGmdnm9tUDbO9IDSwBK6TbQa+PXYPCPy6rbTrTtw7PHkccKrpp0yVhp5HdEIcKr6pLlVDBfOLX9QUsyCOV0wzfjIJNlGEYsdlLJizHhbn2mUjvSAHQqZETYP81eFzLQNnPHt4EVVUh7VfDESU84KezmD5QlWpXLmvU31/yMf+Se8xhHTvKSCZIFImWwoG6mbUoWf9nzpIoaSjB+weqqUUmpaaasXVal72J+UX2B+2RPW3RcT0eOzQgqlJL3RKrTJvdsjE3JEAvGq3lGHSZXy28G3skua2SmVi/w4yCE6gbODqnTWlg7+wC604ydGXA8VJiS5ap43JXiUFFAaQ==";
  }
  {
    type = "ed25519";
    key = "AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIOMqqnkVzrm0SdG6UOoqKLsabgH5C9okWi0dh2l9GKJl";
  }
]
=> {
  "github.com-ed25519" = {
    hostNames = [ "github.com" ];
    publicKey = "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIOMqqnkVzrm0SdG6UOoqKLsabgH5C9okWi0dh2l9GKJl";
  };
  "github.com-rsa" = {
    hostNames = [ "github.com" ];
    publicKey = "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAq2A7hRGmdnm9tUDbO9IDSwBK6TbQa+PXYPCPy6rbTrTtw7PHkccKrpp0yVhp5HdEIcKr6pLlVDBfOLX9QUsyCOV0wzfjIJNlGEYsdlLJizHhbn2mUjvSAHQqZETYP81eFzLQNnPHt4EVVUh7VfDESU84KezmD5QlWpXLmvU31/yMf+Se8xhHTvKSCZIFImWwoG6mbUoWf9nzpIoaSjB+weqqUUmpaaasXVal72J+UX2B+2RPW3RcT0eOzQgqlJL3RKrTJvdsjE3JEAvGq3lGHSZXy28G3skua2SmVi/w4yCE6gbODqnTWlg7+wC604ydGXA8VJiS5ap43JXiUFFAaQ==";
  };
}

lib.helpers.giturl

Create git url aliases for a given domain

Arguments

• [domain] the domain to create the alias for
• [alias] the alias to use
• [user] the user to use, this defaults to "git"
• [port] the port to use, this is optional

Type

giturl :: (String -> String -> String -> Int) -> AttrSet

Example

giturl { domain = "github.com"; alias = "gh"; }
=> {
  "https://github.com/".insteadOf = "gh:";
  "ssh://git@github.com/".pushInsteadOf = "gh:";
}

lib.helpers.filterNixFiles

filter files for the .nix suffix

Arguments

• [k] they key, which is the file name
• [v] the value, which is the type of the file

Type

filterNixFiles :: String -> String -> Bool

Example

filterNixFiles "default.nix" "regular"
=> true

lib.helpers.importNixFiles

Import all file that filterNixFiles allows for

Arguments

• [path] the path to the directory

Type

importNixFiles :: String -> List

Example

importNixFiles ./.
=> [ {...} ]

lib.helpers.importNixFilesAndDirs

import all nix files and directories

Arguments

• [dir] the directory to search for nix files

Type

importNixFilesAndDirs :: String -> List

Example

importNixFilesAndDirs ./.
=> [ "flake.nix" ]

lib.helpers.boolToNum

return an int based on boolean value

Arguments

• [bool] the boolean value

Type

boolToNum :: Bool -> Int

Example

boolToNum true
=> 1

lib.helpers.containsStrings

a function that checks if a list contains a list of given strings

Arguments

• [list] the list to search in
• [targetStrings] the list of strings to search for

Type

containsStrings :: List -> List -> Bool

Example

containsStrings ["a" "b" "c"] ["a" "b"]
=> true

lib.helpers.indexOf

a function that returns the index of an element in a list

Arguments

• [list] the list to search in
• [elem] the element to search for

Type

indexOf :: List -> Any -> Int

Example

indexOf [1 2 3] 2
=> 1

lib.helpers.intListToStringList

convert a list of integers to a list of string

Arguments

• [list] the list of integers

Type

intListToStringList :: List -> List

Example

intListToStringList [1 2 3]
=> ["1" "2" "3"]

lib.secrets:

lib.secrets.mkSystemSecret

Create secrets for use with agenix.

Arguments

• [file] the age file to use for the secret
• [owner] the owner of the secret, this defaults to "root"
• [group] the group of the secret, this defaults to "root"
• [mode] the permissions of the secret, this defaults to "400"

Type

mkSystemSecret :: (String -> String -> String -> String) -> AttrSet

Example

mkSystemSecret { file = "./my-secret.age"; }
=> {
  file = "./my-secret.age";
  owner = "root";
  group = "root";
  mode = "400";
}

lib.services:

lib.services.mkServiceOption

A quick way to use my services abstraction

Arguments

• [name]: The name of the service

Type

mkServiceOption :: String -> (Int -> String -> String -> AttrSet) -> AttrSet

lib.validators:

lib.validators.ifTheyExist

a function that will append a list of groups if they exist in config.users.groups

Arguments

• [config] the configuration that nixosConfigurations provides
• [groups] a list of groups to check for

Type

ifTheyExist :: AttrSet -> List -> List

Example

ifTheyExist config ["wheel" "users"]
=> ["wheel"]

lib.validators.anyHome

check if a predicate for any user config is true

Arguments

• [conf] the configuration that nixosConfigurations provides
• [cond] predicate function to check against config variable

Type

anyHome :: AttrSet -> (Any -> Bool) -> Bool

Example

anyHome config (cfg: cfg.programs.hyprland.enable)
=> true

Resources

A collection of resources from people who just make good stuff.

• Xe's blog
• The aux forum
• Viper's Blog
• Nix Pills, this one might be a bit much if you don't care too much about the internals
• Solène's Blog
• Jade Lovelace's blog
• Astrid's blog
• nixpkgs news
• nix.dev
• cafkafk's blog
• zimbatm's blog
• my own blog
• official wiki
• zero to nix

Projects / Configurations

These are some configuration or projects that I have taken inspiration from or find to be of a high quality that people should also consider reading.

• lovesegfault/nix-config
• jakehamilton/config
• flake parts
• nixos-hardware
• getchoo/flake
• uncenter/flake

People

Thanks to all these people otherwise this config and I would be lost.

• comfysage, for making my day that bit brighter and occasionally putting me on your back
• getchoo, for making catppucin/nix and helping a ton
• nullishamy, for tricking me into using NixOS
• nekowinston, for fixing half my problems
• jakehamilton, for teaching me too much about modules
• nyxkrage, for being there to answer my questions
• NotAShelf, lots of valuable information
• Minion3665, for making me write better docs
• Thorn, picrewnix????

• github
• gitlab
• codeberg
• iztea
• tangled