dotfiles

~ sweet ~

Welcome to my dotfiles repository!

Structure

Here is a breakdown of the structure of the repository:

• hosts contains the dotfiles for my different hosts
  • firelink is my tower running NixOS
  • profaned-capital is my M2 MacBook Air running macOS (with Nix)
  • ringed-city is my work MacBook running macOS (with Nix)
• nixos contains my NixOS configuration
  • This is currently based on firelink but will eventually be made system-agnostic

Installation

This guide will walk through how to install NixOS using the configuration provided in this repo. It is more or less a streamlined version of the "Installation" portion of the NixOS Manual, so you may want to consult that if you have questions.

Note that a lot of this guide is fairly opinionated, so you'll most likely want to tailor it to your own needs.

Obtaining the installation medium

The first thing you'll need is a NixOS installation medium. For that, you'll need to download the NixOS ISO and create an installation medium, like a bootable USB.

Obtaining the installation medium is outside the scope of this guide, so the rest of the guide will assume you have one.

Installing NixOS

Once booted into the NixOS installation medium you'll be greeted with a shell prompt.

From here you can download the installation script with curl:

$ curl -o install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxdeviant/dotfiles/master/nixos/install.sh
$ chmod +x install.sh

In order to perform the install you need to be running as root, so you'll need to drop into a root shell:

$ sudo su

The installation script takes a single argument: the block device on which to install NixOS. You can use lsblk to see which devices are available.

Once you have identified the block device you want to install NixOS on (e.g., /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1), pass it as the first argument to the installation script:

# ./install.sh /dev/sda

If you want to see what install.sh will do before running it you can pass the --dry-run flag.

The installation script may prompt you for input a few times. Navigate the prompts until the script finishes successfully. At the end of the install you'll be prompted to set the password for the root user.

Once the script has completed successfully and the root password has been set you should be all set to restart the computer and boot into NixOS:

# reboot

Installing Home Manager

Installing NixOS is only half the story. In order to get the system completely up and running we also need to install Home Manager to configure our user environment.

I'm still in the process of documenting/automating this phase of the setup.