I’m looking for recommendations for a dotfile manager - there are so many out there I’ve got a bit of options paralysis!
I’d like a system that can backup all my dotfiles - with version management - and, if I nuked my home directory, could restore them all for me with a simple command.
Thanks in advance for you suggestions!
Home-manager on NixOs. It handles more than just dotfiles, as it also manages installed programs.
It works outside of NixOS too! Just need to have the nix package manager installed.
How do you manage
configuration.nix? Can you share? I’ve not yet create a NixOS dotfile.Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).
Here’s my example (Github mirror). It stores everything from my custom packages (like GIMP 2.99, which isn’t yet packaged in nixpkgs, or a custom virtiofsd to workaround an upstream bug caused by switching from the old C to the new Rust implementation), to my fish, sway, rofi, mpv configs, to my entire server setup, including Gitea, Nextcloud, Keycloak, Mumble, mailserver and Matrix server with some bots and bridges (I recently migrated from an x86_64 to a arm64 board and the only post-install setup I had to do was copy /var), to my router’s nftables rules.
Do you host Nextcloud and Gitea locally? Or do you run it on Nix-supported platforms like Railway?
I host it on an Arm SBC lying in the closet, specifically Radxa Rock 5A (well, the dotfiles mention that much). That said, you don’t need your VPS service to offer NixOS provisioning, you can just use nixos-infect
I just use Git for my nixos config files.