My Reproducable Dev Environment using NixOS

Local Environment Info

My daily development environment, running on VMware Workstation | VMware Fusion | MacOS.

Background image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/5Lw1U5BIumE

Install NixOS/Nix(Darwin)

• Without flakes(only on linux vm)

  1. Follow the manual installation guide

  2. Post installation

     a. enable vmware-tools

     virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable = true;

     b. hiDPI settings

     c. install nix flakes

     d. rebuild whole system with sudo nixos-rebuild --flake "."

     e. GUNPG | SSH

• With flakes

  Follow the manual installation guide, replace 2.3.5 command with the following

  # optional dir creation for store dev.nix repo
  sudo mkdir -p /etc/build
  sudo chown -R $(whoami) /etc/build
  
  # when running on darwin, install nix, then darwin first.
  # enter a shell env(with nix flakes installed)
  nix-shell -p nixFlakes git
  
  # clone repo using git
  git clone https://github.com/beetcb/dev.nix.git /etc/build/
  
  # replace hardware configruation with newly generated one(can be safly ignored on darwin)
  cp /mnt/etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix /etc/build/os/nixos/hardware.nix
  
  # finally, install nixos
  ## linux
  sudo nixos-install --impure --flake /etc/build
  ## darwin
  darwin-rebuild switch --flake /etc/build
  
  # ssh stuff
  ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "$($ git config user.email)"
  cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
  ## time to sync your configs to remote git hosting service like github.com,
  ## you can clone my repo and reset remote url(to your cloned repo ssh url) to quickly achieve this.
  git remote set-url origin git@github.com:beetcb/dev.nix.git

Nix/NixOS/VM Gotchas

Bellow is a list of gotchas I've encountered, record them as a reminder.

• Installed sys lib not found by build tools?

• Do port forwarding from localhost to vmhost

• Defragmenting and shrinking VM disk

  1. Disable 3D acceleration temporarily, weird bug on vmware workstation.
  2. Defragmenting and shrinking on guest machine

Channels

Update: use unstatble channel for all!

• For system pkgs: nixos latest statble channel
• For user pkgs: mixin of nixos latest unstatble & statble channel

Quick options refs

• nix-darwin https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html
• home-manager https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.html
• nixvim https://pta2002.github.io/nixvim/