Installation

Enable flake(optional)

It's recommended to use home-manager together with flake enabled. If you haven't enabled flake yet, do the following for single user:

echo 'experimental-features = nix-command flakes' >> ~/.config/nix/nix.conf

or the following for multi-users:

sudo sh -c 'echo "experimental-features = nix-command flakes" >> /etc/nix/nix.conf'

NOTE

This documentation only uses home-manager with flakes.

Installation

Add channel for home-manager

• Unstable

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager && nix-channel --update

• Stable(24.05)

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-24.05.tar.gz home-manager && nix-channel --update

TIP

For version number, see: Nix Channels

Install

nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install

INFO

<home-manager> is the channel alias you set in previous step. Replace it with yours if necessary.

After this command, home-manager should be available.

Initialize home-manager

Initialize home-manager config by:

home-manager init

This command generates flake.nix, home.nix under ~/.config/home-manager/

• flake.nix: metadata used for home-manager.
• home.nix: entry point of home-manager. Uses attribute set from flake.nix.

Apply home-manager profile

By default, home-manager init{:sh} generates by current username.

# generated in home.nix
home.username = "sharpchen";

So it should be valid to switch to the profile with following:

home-manager switch --flake ~/.config/home-manager#$USER

This is how you restore a home-manager profile for a user. And this also implies home-manager can handle multiple users' profiles.

TIP

Set an command alias for home-manager switch!

Reference

• Home Manager Manual