Articles for #nix-on-mac

In part one of this series we installed Nix, set up our system configuration with nix-darwin, and installed some packages at the system level. In this post, we’ll set up home-manager.

Unlike nix-darwin, home-manager is cross-platform: it works across NixOS, macOS, and anywhere else Nix can be installed. It was difficult at first for me to understand how home-manager and nix-darwin should interact. While there is definitely overlap with what these two Nix libraries can do, nix-darwin is used for managing system-wide settings and applications: it brings the power of NixOS to the Mac. home-manager on the other hand is most useful for managing user-level configuration and dotfiles.

By the end of this post we’ll have installed home-manager and used it to set up configuration for vim, zsh, and git.

I think Nix is really cool. Nix the package manager and functional configuration language is most often associated with NixOS the Linux distro, but nix-darwin makes it almost as easy to declaratively configure macOS as it is to configure NixOS installations. Even if you’ll still relying on Homebrew for package management and never touch nixpkgs, I’d say that Nix with nix-darwin provides the best way to manage packages and system configuration on macOS.

Unfortunately, the resources for getting started and integrating different parts of the Nix ecosystem are not particularly approachable for beginners. When I started out I would often use GitHub’s code search to trawl through other people’s configs and try different snippets until I found what actually worked. Inspired by Arne Bahlo’s Emacs from Scratch series, I wanted to create a guide to help folks get started with Nix on macOS from scratch, step by step.

Throughout this series we’ll create a declarative system configuration with Nix where you can manage anything from your shell aliases to what VSCode extensions you have installed to running daemons with launchd. We’ll build up to this incrementally: by the end of this post, you’ll have Nix installed on your system and be able to declaratively install system-level packages from either Nixpkgs or Homebrew.