John Pulford's dotfiles repo

Quick Update Commands

To update the system configuration, use one of these commands:

# For NixOS systems (can run as root initially, but long-term should run as user)
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#nixos --cores 0

# For specific host configurations
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#kawaiinixos --cores 0
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#rossnixos --cores 0

Important Notes

• Initial Setup: You can run these commands as root during initial setup
• Long-term Usage: Should be run as the user specified in the relevant userdata file from their home directory (~/dotfiles)
• Why User Directory: Some configuration folders expect to be writable by the user, so running from the user's home directory ensures configs work properly

WSL (standalone home-manager)

WSL runs Nix on top of an ordinary Ubuntu rootfs, so there is no NixOS or nix-darwin layer. The john@wsl output is a standalone home-manager configuration instead (nix/hosts/wsl/home.nix): user-level only, no sudo.

# Bootstrap (home-manager is not installed yet).
# -b backup renames any pre-existing file it would overwrite to <name>.backup
nix run github:nix-community/home-manager -- switch -b backup --flake ~/dotfiles#john@wsl

# Subsequent updates (home-manager installs itself into the profile)
home-manager switch --flake ~/dotfiles#john@wsl

Three manual steps Nix cannot do for you:

1. Generate the en_US.UTF-8 locale on the Ubuntu side. Ubuntu's WSL image ships only C/C.UTF-8/POSIX. The host config sets LANG=en_US.UTF-8 (home-manager's CLI panics parsing C.UTF-8 as a language tag and exits 101, after activation has already succeeded) and provides a Nix glibcLocales via LOCALE_ARCHIVE for Nix-built binaries. Ubuntu's own glibc cannot read that archive — different glibc version — so Debian tooling such as perl warns until the locale also exists system-side:

   sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

2. Retire ~/.gitconfig. home-manager writes ~/.config/git/config, and git reads both, with ~/.gitconfig taking precedence — so an existing ~/.gitconfig silently overrides the managed one. Its contents have been folded into nix/hosts/wsl/home.nix, so remove it once you have switched: mv ~/.gitconfig ~/.gitconfig.pre-hm
3. Set zsh as the login shell. Standalone home-manager cannot call chsh. Use the ~/.nix-profile path, not the /nix/store one, so it survives rebuilds:

   echo "$HOME/.nix-profile/bin/zsh" | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
   chsh -s "$HOME/.nix-profile/bin/zsh"

   Nix's zsh does not read /etc/profile, so /etc/profile.d/nix.sh — which is what puts the Nix profiles on PATH for bash — never runs in a login zsh. Without help, a login shell has neither nix nor home-manager on PATH. home.sessionPath in the host config covers this; see the comment there for the ordering rationale.

Notes specific to this host:

• Uses wsl_packages (headless core) rather than default_packages, which drops texliveFull, the Android SDK and anki-bin.
• cudaSupport = false is applied at the flake call site, keeping the CUDA LD_LIBRARY_PATH (and its multi-GB closure) out of the WSL profile while leaving the GPU desktop hosts unchanged.
• Claude Code is left to its own self-updating native installer; adding pkgs.claude-code here would shadow it and pin the version.
• utilities/ssh/id_ed25519.pub is not linked into ~/.ssh. It is a placeholder key (its comment is still your_email@example.com, matching the stub in userdata.authorizedKeys) and does not correspond to any private key on this host, so linking it would clobber a working public key.

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⚠️ OUTDATED CONTENT BELOW

The information below is outdated. For current usage, see the updated instructions:

Screenshot

Nix

NixOS

Bootstrap

To bootstrap NixOS with my dotfiles, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to ~/dotfiles under a username matching the username HOME directory defined in configuration.nix
2. Change the username defined configuration.nix

To update the system

1. Run nix flake update ~/dotfiles
2. Run ~/dotfiles/scripts/switch.sh

Cleanup old generations

sudo nix-collect-garbage --delete-older-than 7d
sudo nix-store --optimise

MacOS

Install XCode manually as this cannot currently be automated

then run these commands: sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer && sudo xcodebuild -runFirstLaunch

Bootstrap

To bootstrap nix on MacOS with my dotfiles, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to ~/dotfiles
2. Change the username defined configuration.nix
3. Install Nix on MacOS sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)
4. Run nix flake update ~/dotfiles
5. Run nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes run nix-darwin -- switch --flake ~/dotfiles#macbook-m1

To update the system

After bootstrapping, you can update your system by running ~/dotfiles/scripts/switch.sh