pwnwriter's notes

How to Install Nix on any Linux VPS

Nix is a versatile package manager, programming language, and even a complete Linux distribution. It stands out with its focus on reproducibility and declarative configuration.

Download and Run the Installer

We'll be using determinate system's nix installer

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- --install

You should have nix installed by now.

nix --version

Let's install a pkg tmux

nix profile install nixpkgs#tmux

we can even install package for temp shell

nix-shell -p git

Installing Home Manager

Finally, we'll use Home Manager, a tool designed to manage the user environment (e.g., dotfiles) in a declarative way using Nix. We'll start by adding the minimal configuration needed to get Home Manager up and running.

First, create a dotfiles directory if you don't have one already (the name of the directory does not matter). Use git init (or your favorite GUI) to initialize a Git repository in the folder. Add the following two files:

mkdir dotfiles; cd dotfiles; git init

{
  description = "Your description here";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
    home-manager = {
      url = "github:nix-community/home-manager";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = { nixpkgs, home-manager, ... }: {
    homeConfigurations = {
      <Yourname> = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
        pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux;
        modules = [
          ./modules
          {
            home.username = "username";
            home.stateVersion = "23.11";
            home.homeDirectory = "/home/username";
          }
        ];
      };

    };
  };
}

Place the above file as flake.nix.

Now the directory tree should look like this

This flake initiales all the modules from modules directory.

For example to configure git, it goes something like this

{ pkgs, ... }:
let
  name = "username";
  email = "main";
in
{
  programs.git = {
    enable = true;
    userName = name;
    userEmail = email;
  };
}

Now we'll need to source it inside modules,

Like lua's init.lua' we have default.nix in nix.

We'll now import out git.nix using modules/default.nix file and it goes something like this.

{ config, ... }:

let
  modules = [
    ./git.nix
  ];
in
{
  imports = modules;

  xdg.dataHome = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/.local/share";
  programs.home-manager.enable = true;
}

We can now build our config using following.

nix run github:nix-community/home-manager -- switch --flake .#your_name

It should generate your config like below.