Installation Guide

Installing the Channel

This is a Guix channel. You will first need to install Guix itself. Then, simply create a new ~/.config/guix/channels.scm file with this content:

(cons* (channel
        (name 'guix-home-manager)
        (url "https://framagit.org/tyreunom/guix-home-manager.git"))
       %default-channels)

Then run guix pull to pull the new channel.

If the file already exist, simply add the (channel) form above to the list of channels in the file. Make sure you use (cons*) (with a star) and not (cons) since the later can only take one channel and %default-channels as argument, whereas the first can take as many channels as you'd like before %default-channels.

Important checks

Make sure your guix environment is set up properly. You need to have ~/.config/guix/current as the first item in your $PATH or you're going to run into troubles. Additionnaly, after running guix pull, make sure you run hash guix in any open terminal to make sure bash's cache is cleared of the old guix binary location.

Usage

Making some room in your home directory

It is recommended to use this in a new install, when your home directory is still pretty empty. Since your home directory will be made into a Guix profile, you first want to create a new directory for your user data, for instance as root:

mkdir -p /data/alice
chown alice: /data/alice

if your user is named alice. Then, move all your data over to that directory. Do not transfer your configuration, it will be useless. That transfering of data is the reason why it's simpler to start with an empty home: there is no data to transfer ;)

Once that is done, some parts of your home directory will still have to be read-write. This is mostly ~/.cache, ~/.local but also ~/.guix-profile and ~/.config/guix. Inside your new data directory, create them like this, as your regular user (alice in this example):

cd /data/alice
mkdir-p .local/share .cache .config

Creating the first home generation

To create your first home configuration, you must create a configuration file. For instance, create /data/alice/.config/guix/home.scm:

(use-modules (home))

(home "/data/alice"
  '())

This will generate a completely empty home, except for essential configurations, i. e. writable XDG directories as well as essential guix symlinks.

See the documentation to learn more about the configuration system.

To build your first generation of your home environment, run as your regular user:

guix package -p /var/guix/profiles/per-user/alice/home \
  -f /data/alice/.config/guix/home.scm

Still as your regular user, copy your ~/.config/guix to your data directory. This will ensure you can still use Guix after you switch to the managed home profile:

cp -ar ~/.config/guix /data/alice/.config/

Finaly, switch to the managed home profile as root:

mv /home/alice{,.bak} # keep a backup in case something goes wrong
ln -sv /var/guix/profiles/per-user/alice/home /home/alice

That's it!