Introduction

This is my personal NixOS configuration, that configures multiple devices simultaneously, to be able to share all my development tools across all desktop environments, and to also be able to share some core system settings & utilities across all my devices.

Installation

Configuration

Install NixOS. The nixos-generate-config command will usually generate hardware specific configuration into hardware-configuration.nix. The hardware configuration is placed somewhere else in this repo, so once the configuration files have been generated, put the hardware specific configurations in devices/{name}/hardware.nix.

You need to add a device.nix file in /etc/nixos to specify the name of the device, so that the configuration can finally enable the hardware specific settings. You can copy device.nix.example to device.nix. Then you need to create a devices/{name}/params.nix file to further tune in some device parameters. See the params.nix file of other devices for inspiration. This covers putting the configuration in place.

Synchronize personal data

If you had put a syncthingId in the params.nix file, syncthing will be configured to synchronize all sorts of personal data, including the password store. In order for this to work, the new device configuration must have been pushed to the repository and pulled onto one of the other devices as well. Then the synchronization can start happening.

Keep in mind that since the SSH keys have not been installed at this point, you can't push the configuration changes from the device you are setting up yet. An option would be to scp the configuration to another device.

Keys

PGP

The next thing to put into place is probably my PGP key. This is also going to be needed to access the password store. This is a manual action that is not automated. But for reference, here is what to do when you have the key placed in my-key.pgp, as the bamilab user:

gpg --import my-key.pgp
gpg --list-keys # To check the key id of the just imported key
gpg --edit-key <KEY-ID>

In the dialog of the second command, run trust, then 5, and then save. The PGP key should now be imported.

SSH

Once the password store is available and accessible, we can put other keys into place. To get the SSH keys, run the command install-ssh-keys as the bamilab user. You may still need to run ssh-add as any user to make use of the key.

Now you can also start pushing to this git repo. So within /etc/nixos, change the remote url like so:

git remote set-url origin [email protected]:bamidev/nixos-config

Conclusion

Now you should have everything ready to go on the new device: my passwords & keys, my personal files, and my system and applications configuration.