Guix Home Manager

This is a Guix channel for user configuration management. Guix itself comes with the possibility of managing system configuration when installed as a standalone operating system. This project aims at going one step further and managing your personal configuration entirely with Guix.

For this purpose, the channel extends Guix with more code that will allow you to generate configuration files in a profile that will replace your home directory. With Home Manager, your home directory is read-only, so software will not be able to put any of their garbage in it, unless you specifically allow them to.

This is quite an extreme approach for configuration management, but it follows the Guix spirit and provides strong guarantee that your configuration is exactly as you want it to be.

Installing

This is a Guix channel. You will first need to install Guix itself. Then, simply create a new ~/.config/guix/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.

Usage

This is also documented (and translated) in the documentation section of this project:

• Il existe aussi une version francophone de la documentation.

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!

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If there’s a configuration you would like to add, just fork the repository and create a Merge Request when it is ready.

If you have a history of making quality contributions to GNU Guix and would like commit access, just ask! Non trivial changes should still go through a simple Merge Request and code review process, but this channel needs your help to take over the world!

If you are less into code, we welcome contributions in the form of documentation, translation, issues, reviews, tips and tricks. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you have an idea or want to help in any way!