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Comment by BreakfastB0b | Hacker News Reader

We recently adopted it at my company for managing local dev machines, project environments, and CI. It definitely has some warts, often the best documentation is “read the source code”, but man is it an awesome tool. I’ve switched all of my machines / servers over to it and I’ll never look back.

Now I’m looking at my iPad and iPhone and wishing I could manage them through Nix too.

I’d put it at a comparable difficulty to learn / powerful tool as git. Which given that they’re both based on hash trees makes sense.

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Though the documentation may be lacking, or difficult for beginners, I'd like to point out that I've found the community to be extremely helpful, patient and welcoming when asking questions and for help on Matrix.

How can one use Nix to manage project-specific dependencies that typically store Dotfiles in annoying locations like the home folder?

I am aware of home-manager but am not sure how (or if) it would work for per-project dot file management.

Can you say what specifically? Many language-specific package managers match your description and are completely handled by Nix, but maybe you're talking about something else?

Can you name a tool which does not allow per project local configuration files?

One option to do it per project with hm would be to add new options which set certain configuration options.

Considering any command-line tool that requires a dotfile to be in some ~/<path>

First, direnv (along with nix-direnv) is really the glue that makes all of this work seamlessly.

It depends on what the dotfiles are for and how they're used.

Here's an example of a problematic one: AWS configs. You can theoretically override the default location of these files with environment variables, but a lot of tooling doesn't respect this and will break as a result.

I often deal with a large number of AWS accounts, so my solution is to have one main way for populating AWS config files that lives outside of projects, and then, because I have a rubric for account/role assignment naming, I can select the correct account/role for each project, and I can even have projects that switch them based on specific code/deployments.

There's an experiment Nix fork of Temrux for Android, if you want to try on mobile. Good luck on an iPhone though.

There's also actual nixos for mobile, although then you're really limited in hardware options.

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