HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
nix-community
home-manager
Nix2017–2026
nix-community / home-manager

home-manager

Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@khaneliman, @rycee]

Command LineSystems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
53Distinct people
65Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@khaneliman, @rycee]

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year65 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-09-08 08:31:43 UTC to 2026-04-23 14:40:50 UTC.

0510152017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 1 submissions, 15 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16115
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

65 sources
codethief·May 27, 2025
Just NixOS. When building the VM / live CD I copy my dotfiles into the Nix store and then during first boot-up I copy them into my home dir and set up symlinks. The main reason I decided against home-manager was that it makes my simple symlink setup (~/.foo -> ~/.dotfiles/foo) virtually impossible: Symlinks will always point to the read-only Nix store in one way or another. See https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/3514 or one of the countless other tickets on the topic. Through this episode I also learned that home-manager isn't exactly well-documented, either, and also quite opinionated. (Which, to be fair, is not a bad thing – if it works for you, it probably works great.) Finally, not using home-manager was also a risk management decision in that it's probably best to not go all-in on Nix, NixOS, home-manager etc. all a
Read the rest
t once. Start with the simplest possible config that gets you running, then iterate.
In I think it's time to give Nix a chance
Zambyte·Mar 13, 2024
Guix started as a fork of Nix, but I believe all original Nix code has been replaced with Guix specific code at this point. Core functionality is pretty comparable between the two of them. Two differences I can tell you immediately is that GNU Guix has a built in user home configuration management system[0], and Nix depends on an external module to do the same[1]. NixOS, like most distros uses systemd for it's init system. GNU Guix uses Shepherd[2]. Honestly it hasn't really been much of a point of note in my experience, but it's probably worth mentioning as a difference. Regarding Free vs non-Free packages: this can be a pain point if your system requires non-Free packages to function on GNU Guix. I (like most other Guix users I would guess) use the nonguix[3] channel for additional packages. One of my systems requires the baseline Linux
Read the rest
kernel for propriety Ethernet drivers (included in Linux because of GPLv2 :P), so I had to create a custom installation ISO with the baseline kernel. This probably sounds horrifying, but creating a custom installation ISO is actually very easy in Guix (and probably Nix as well). It's the only distro I've ever done it for. But between the main Guix channel, nonguix, and Flatpak, it's very uncommon that I cannot find what I want. According to repology[4], Guix is the #5 repo for most packages. And the few packages that I have wanted that were missing, I have actually been able to contribute package definitions for upstream to Guix, since the process is very easy and well documented (also the only distro I have ever done that for). [0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration.... [1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd [3] https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix [4] https://repology.org/
In Identifying Software
TheDong·Jan 23, 2024
They're read-only because I use a dotfile manager for them, and that manager owns the contents of those files, so it doesn't want external changes to mess with them. I'm specifically using home-manager [0], but various other profile managers will also make them read-only... Especially since any changes to them will just be over-written next time you apply your dotfiles, right? I think 'direnv' is really the way to go here for most cases you want to share environment variables between developer machines, but if you're managing user's shell rc files, then you might as well use proper configuration management, because ad-hoc appending strings to those rc files is the stuff of nightmares. [0]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
In Show HN: Sendenv, a CLI tool to share environment variables
rgoulter·Nov 12, 2023
> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally. Per the Nix manual[0]: > Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version. e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]: nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager [0] https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/nix-channel [1] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.html#sec-...
In An Overview of Nix in Practice
hackernudes·Jun 20, 2023
I don't have a good guide. I had to just start getting my hands dirty and piece it together. My strategies: - keep the documentation open - install nixos in a vm - search github for "configuration.nix" to find fully worked examples for nixos. I just cloned anything that looked useful[1] and would grep through it - read the source code for nixpkgs - search google and search https://discourse.nixos.org/ when you have an idea of what you want to do to find other people discussing it It took me a couple days to have a very basic system running and a month to port most of my setup into nix (running some containers, overriding system packages, defining my own packages, running unmodified binaries using nix-ld). I still use non-nix containers for a few services that I don't want to port over (but if I had known nix when I started I definitely wo
Read the rest
uld've used it). Every step of the way was a huge struggle but the tools I have learned stay useful so I hope it is worthwhile investment. Still sometimes the extra nix friction is really frustrating but I can't help but think Nix or something like it is inevitably the future of software. [1]: here is my random current list with some good and some bad... https://cgit.euer.krebsco.de/stockholm/ https://github.com/9ary/dotfiles.git https://github.com/baitinq/nixos-config https://github.com/barrucadu/nixfiles.git https://github.com/catern/dotfiles.git https://github.com/contrun/infra.git https://github.com/disassembler/network.git https://github.com/juliosueiras/rasp-nix/ https://github.com/KFearsoff/NixOS-config.git https://github.com/lopsided98/nixos-config https://github.com/Mic92/dotfiles.git https://github.com/moul/nixpkgs.git https://github.com/musnix/musnix https://github.com/myme/dotfiles https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager.git https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-org-configurations.git https://github.com/reckenrode/nixos-configs https://github.com/skogsbrus/os https://github.com/Xe/nixos-configs.git https://github.com/Xe/site.git https://git.immae.eu/perso/Immae/Config/Nix.git https://gitlab.com/pgronkievitz/nixos-configurations.git https://gitlab.com/rprospero/dotfiles.git
In My First Impressions of Nix
OmarAssadi·Jan 23, 2023
Nix is pretty usable for both desktops and headless servers. Personally, I even use it on macOS without much trouble. My system looks like any other install of Ventura, but all of my configuration, ranging from the terminal and VS Code to macOS-specific system preferences and Safari, is done declaratively in Nix [1]. The overwhelming majority of my installed software also comes from Nix packages, with some exceptions for stuff that is not packaged yet (e.g., I have Podman Desktop, the macOS ZFS port, Lulu, yubikey-manager-qt installed through Homebrew -- fortunately nix-darwin [2] also just lets me have an set of brews/casks in my config). It was been a bit of a nightmare at first since the error messages are kind of horrific, and there can be a lack of good examples/docs on flakes. But I think the weekend worth of time I invested was wor
Read the rest
th it since I no longer need to rely on hacky shellscripts or remember to manually configure anything. [1]: <https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager> [2]: <https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin>
In Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix

Showing the 15 most recent of 65 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.