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In the same vein as TA, nix-darwin[1] can be used to configure macOS applications and services. It's not exactly the same as NixOS because the whole system is not entirely managed by Nix but it gets you closer.

There is also Ansible, Chef, Puppet, ... but in my experience the overhead to write and test those config files is even hired than using Nix.

[1]: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

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In practice you can actually get extremely close to having Nix manage your whole macOS system with the exception of actual OS-level updates (and particular tools like Xcode, I suppose).

John Wiegley’s system configuration [0] is an example of this, although it is extremely ambitious and definitely not a good place to start for anyone who has used Nix before.

One of the interesting things that Wiegley does for further reproducibility is to have Nix manage and install DMG-based Applications [1] in addition to CLI apps, services, and other system-level things.

[0] https://github.com/jwiegley/nix-config

[1] https://github.com/jwiegley/nix-config/blob/bbad310daa1106f6...

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