I Use Nix on macOS | Hacker News Reader

I Use Nix on macOS

blog.6nok.org

22 pointsfrontsideair16 comments

I’ve beeen using Nix on macOS for years now, and I don’t imagine ever going back. Declarative software management is the future. So easy to keep my dev environment up-to-date and quickly try out new packages. Never breaks.

Also, no more docker! docker on macOS was always a pain.

I made it easy for others to try if you’re interested, almost 800 stars now:

https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config

This looks like a treasure trove that I somehow missed! I'll give it a more thorough read later, but gave my star for now, thanks!

There exists nix-darwin, which allows for installing and configuring graphical apps on macOS. However, in my experience the OS starts freaking out about permissions every time you build --switch. Something about changing around the symlinks to .app files confuses it and resets permissions and duplicates autostart entries and such, which unfortunately got me to give up on it.

I’ve been using Nix on Mac for a couple years now and haven’t seen this behavior. Just works.

Maybe mixing sudo / user permissions during initial installation broke it. Nix is pretty unforgiving with not great error messages.

I'm a recent convert and set up nix-darwin and home-manager on a flake-based system, have not had any issues like this.

it's interesting to me that the author didn't spend much time on home-manager or flakes. home-manager is apparently too complicated for OPs workflow which I could kinda see for simple things. But reproducibility is one of the strongest selling points of nix.

So.. that being said, you can setup home-manager to install and configure things from git. Using flakes makes it more reproducible.

These means that you can just git clone and 'home-manager switch' and setup everything from scratch.

I do this on both mac and linux machines (ubuntu 20) and quite often use the same nix expressions.

I'd highly recommend that workflow, since it's git, you can do anything you want. Go back a month via git on a branch and make that machine exist again.

It really makes managing software fearless

I'm really interested in `home-manager` honestly, and while I agree about the benefits of declarative package management, I find it easier to type commands at a terminal like `nix profile upgrade pkg` or `nix registry pin nixpkgs`, with the guarantee of rollbacks.

Since when I'm editing a text file to update a package, I have to look for the latest version separately and copy/paste it into my editor. If I somehow mess it up the file is broken, while no harm is done I still find this workflow a bit brittle.

If there are home-manager commands I missed to do this, I'd be eager to give it a try. That kind of workflow would remind me of running `npm upgrade pkg` and have it reflected on a `package.json` file.

> nix run nixpkgs#cowsay

> This is a game-changer, you don’t have to pollute your system to run a one-off command, or you can try a package out before committing to installing it.

Is there a way to run the command isolated from the rest of the system? Because while this is nice it will still leave behind whatever configuration files / caches the program created on start up.

you can run nix in a container

It's tricky because said program probably needs to access the original $HOME

Not on macOS, but if you want run NixOS in a VM or on bare metal you can use nix-impermanence. Recreates your system/state from scratch on each reboot.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence

Nothing nix specific but you may be interested in https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap

Yeah I'm familiar, I was hoping for something more integrated, it seems like it would be a pretty good fit.

> What you may miss from Homebrew > > The only thing that comes to mind is Homebrew Cask

https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html#opt-homebre...

I've been using Nix through Jetpack's Devbox and I'm kinda happy, btw.

Not a fan of nix as it literally deleted itself from my machine after running some command or other lmao

I guess you ran nix-shell which left you with an updated `$PATH`?

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