NixOS à la Oli

This repository describes my personal NixOS configuration, modules, and packages.

I've experimented over the years with various methods, from bare flakeless NixOS configurations, to flake-parts. Ultimately I've settled on snowfall-lib as it does a huge amount of the legwork for me and while I don't always agree with the decisions of opinionated frameworks, it definitely takes away a lot of the thinking on my part and just lets me write the fun bits.

I'm not going to explain how snowfall works in detail, if you've come to this repository looking for inspiration and haven't heard of it, the documentation can be found here. In short, snowfall automatically produces my flake outputs through an opinionated folder structure.

Some quick gotchas to save you some time;

• There's almost certainly stuff in the lib folder that I've written (or borrowed) that I am using frequently. If you see anything and are wondering "wtf is enabled" or "I didn't realise I could do mkOpt instead of mkOption" then there's a good chance it's from there. Check the top of the file for with lib.olistrik.
• The modules/nixos folder is exposed to all of my NixOS hosts automatically under the namespace olistrik. I try to namespace everything.
• My nixvim config has moved to olistrik/nixvim-config. Sorry if you came here looking for that.

How to use my Packages

If for some reason you'd like to use my packages, you're more than welcome to do so. However, keep in mind all the risks that come with that. This is like my own little personal AUR. That said, I neither want to package nor distribute malicious code, so if you notice that one of my packages is bad or out-of-date, please let me know.

Otherwise, using my packages is pretty straight forward. Just add my default overlay to your nixpkgs and your done. Here's an example of a devshell with my base nixvim:

{
  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
  inputs.flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";

  # add my repo as an input.
  inputs.olistrik.url = "github:olistrik/nixos-config";

  outputs = { flake-utils, nixpkgs, olistrik, ... }: 
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (
        system: let
            pkgs = import nixpkgs {
                inherit system; 
                # add the default overlay to your nixpkgs.
                overlays = [ olistrik.overlays.default ];
            }; 
        in {
            devShell = pkgs.mkShell {
                # use it! 
                packages = with pkgs; [ olistrik.nixvim ];
            };
        };
    );
}

All of my packages additionally expose individual overlays, and are also exported through the packages output for every standard architecture, however I only use x86-64_linux so your mileage may vary on darwin or aarch64.

Thus there are numorous ways you can use them, including the classic nix run "github:olistrik/nixos-config#nixvim".

My module organization

I'll document this later. Honestly though, they're mine. You probably shouldn't use them.

My Nixvim configuration

Has moved to olistrik/nixvim-config. Namely because it was becoming quite frustrating that small changes required rebuilding my entire system. Moving it hasn't really changed that, arguably it has made it worse, as any changes I make there now require updating the flake.lock here in-order for them to persist system-wide.

Installation notes

This is mainly for me, you probably don't want to be installing my systems yourself. I currently have two systems configured using this repository; my personal laptop and daily driver Thoth, and my home server Hestia which hosts everything from home automation applications to steam game servers.

Build Live USB

This flake exports an x86-64_install_iso image that is preconfigured with git, flake support, nixvim, and to accept my laptops SSH key.

Build it, burn it, and boot it in UEFI mode.

Format SSD or HDD

Do what you want, luks, zfs, fat12. Get it all mounted to /mnt. I usually use disko for this, Thoth being a principle this.

In summary though:

sdx1

512MB EFI, mounted to /mnt/efi. !! This is recommended by systemd, but requires boot.loader.efi.efiSysMountPoint = "/efi" !!

optional: sdx2

A ~32GB swap partion if I'm using ZFS, otherwise I skip this just use a swap file.

sdxN

I use the rest of the drive as a single / partition, I don't bother splitting partitions off for everything else.

Install

For any host other than my main, I don't bother cloning the repo anymore. I just use rebuild --target <host> from Thoth. Naturally though, that isn't possible when doing a clean install of Thoth, in that scenario I clone this repo to /persist/nixos and install it using ./rebuild directly.

I haven't worked out yet how to keep the hardware-config.nix out of the repo and only on the host, given how flakes work I doubt it's possible or desirable. Thus I must generate it on the target host and copy it back to Thoth.

nixos-generate-config

# scp the hardware config back to Thoth, setup and push the new host.

nixos-install --flake "github:olistrik/nixos-config#<hostname>"

reboot

If the host needs secrets, it'll need a nixwarden access token which I usually place in /var/lib/nixwarden/nixwarden.key.

Nixwarden is another yet another WIP in dire need of renovation and documentation.

Updating

I only keep this repo on Thoth, any changes there with or without pushing I can install on all my tailscale connected hosts with:

rebuild switch --target hostname

TODO:

• rebuild switch --all