Home 🏠

"Home is where the configuration is..."

Home is a Nix-based declarative system configuration for MacOS using nix, nix-darwin, and home-manager.

The motiviation is to have as many things as possible about my setup configured declaratively in code.

Setup

These instructions assume you are installing on a new MacOS machine with Apple silicon. As of February 2025, I am running this on an Mac Mini with M4 chips.

Install Nix

I used the Determinate Nix GUI installer to install nix.

To test that nix is installed run the following:

> nix --version
nix (Nix) 2.24.12

Get git and xcode-select tools

On a new Apple machine if you type git it might prompt you to automatically install xcode-select tools.

Setup ~/.config directory

If ~/.config doesn't exist then create it.

Next, clone this repo into ~/.config

> cd ~/.config 
> git clone https://github.com/alexbielen/home nix-darwin-config

Run nix-darwin

You'll first want to change to the nix-darwin-config directory which should look like this:

.
├── README.md
├── application-config
├── flake.lock
└── flake.nix

In flake.nix you'll find a block that looks like the following:

    let
      user = "alexbielen";
      host = "Alexs-Mac-mini";

You can update these to whatever is relevant.

Then run the following:

> darwin-rebuild switch flake -- .

The first run of this should take some time.