Fran314's NixOS configuration

This repo contains my multi-profile NixOS configuration.

Note

This is not meant to be a general purpose configuration. You're free to take inspiration from it and use it as you like, but don't expect it to work on your machine out of the box without some serious tweaking

Profiles

This configuration is structured around three profiles:

• latias: this is the profile for my laptop. It's supposed to be a full-featured environment intended for multiple possible uses, from simple daily browsing, to coding, 3D modeling and more,
• kyogre: this is the profile for my desktop. Its main use is gaming with games that wouldn't run on the laptop. It inherits much of its configuration from latias, mainly for convenience of having the same setup
• umbreon: this is the profile for my homelab. It's supposed to be a CLI-only but comfortable environment, intended to be used for managing self-hosted applications via ssh.
• altaria: this is the profile for an Hetzner VPS. It's meant to be as lightweight as possible (given the 40GB disk limit), and has no access to any secret since it's considered untrusted. Its installation differs from the other profiles.

Installation (latias/kyogre/umbreon)

Caution

This installation assumes that you have access to your secrets-flash-drive. This installation will fail if it doesn't find the secrets in the correct places, so make sure you have your flash drive and make sure to install the secrets (see below for how to install the secrets)

Install default NixOS image

First, install NixOS on the desired machine via a installer ISO (use the graphical installation, even if you want to install to a desktop-environment-less configuration. The profile installation will make it desktop-environment-less, but while setting things up it is much more convenient to be able to easily access a browser).

For this installation, install with Swap (with Hibernate) and set Allow Unfree Software to true.

(This installation might get stuck at 46%. It happens, and it takes A LOT to finish. Just make the logs visible next to the progress bar to make sure that something is actually happening)

Install the secrets

Assuming that you have access to secrets-flash-drive, you should be able to import the secrets using the executable bundled with the secret's export, as

cd /path/to/usb/mountpoint
sudo ./secrets-manager import .

If for some reason the executable is not bundled together with the secrets, you can find it at the secrets manager repository, which you can either manually compile or run with (though you need experimental features to use nix run so if this is a fresh install, it probably is a bit pointless)

sudo nix run github:Fran314/secrets-manager-rs -- import /path/to/usb/mountpoint

Alternatively, secrets-manager is meant to be interoperable, as in you are able to import its exports without using secrets-manager. See secrets manager's Interoperability section to see how to manually import the secrets without secrets-manager, using only coreutils and age

Install configuration

Start a shell with git and neovim using

nix-shell -p git neovim

Using this shell, clone this repo to ~/.dotfiles/nixos with

mkdir -p ~/.dotfiles/nixos
git clone [email protected]:Fran314/nixos.git ~/.dotfiles/nixos

Additionally, you might want to clone repos related to this configuration:

# repo for the custom nvim flake
mkdir -p ~/.dotfiles/nixvim
git clone [email protected]:Fran314/nixvim.git ~/.dotfiles/nixvim

# repo for the private (but not top-secret) data
mkdir -p ~/.dotfiles/nixos-private
git clone [email protected]:Fran314/nixos-private.git ~/.dotfiles/nixos-private

Note that these repos are not needed to fully install the configuration, you only need to install them locally if you intend to edit them.

Then, build the system with

sudo nixos-rebuild boot --flake ~/.dotfiles/nixos#YOUR_PROFILE_NAME

The changes will be available on reboot

Post-installation

Despite NixOS being an 100% declarative OS, a couple of finalization steps are required. It's a bit of a bummer, but they're the last imperative configuration you'll ever have to do.

If you're running the latias or kyogre profile you might want to

• remove the unused version of the xdg-dirs (see remove-old-xdg.sh),
• (if you're using GNOME) add the nvim-memo window to the floating exceptions for pop-shell

Installation (altaria)

The installation for altaria differs from the other profiles since it has to be done through the Hetzner console.

The following installation process is a readaptation of these two guides ([1], [2]) adapted to my specific configuration. It will be assumed that you already own an Hetzner VPS (with any distro installed, it doesn't matter).

Step 1: Hetzner Console

Caution

The first step is to download and run a script from this repository. You should NEVER blindly download and run a script from the internet, so take your time to inspect it and make sure that you understand every command.

The reason behind this step is that it is incredibly tedious to do the steps done by the script manually, as the Hetzner console is incredibly slow and doesn't map correctly with the italian keyboard.

Mount the NixOS minimal ISO onto the VPS (you can find it already available in the ISO Images section). Power off and on the VPS.

Open the Hetzner Console, you should boot into the ISO. Once in, download the following script:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Fran314/nixos/refs/heads/main/altaria-install

Note that when you paste this in the Hetzner Console (you can do it by right-clicking), some characters might be swapped for others, in particular : will become ; (you can type : by pressing ç).

INSPECT THE SCRIPT and make sure to understand it, then run

sudo bash altaria-install

In this order, you will be asked to:

• press y twice for creating the ext4 filesystems
• create (and confirm) a password for the account baldo
• enter your ssh public key through nano into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (once again being careful of characters swaps, such as + for = or @ for 2)

Once you have done this, the system should shut off automatically. You can now close the console forever, unmount the ISO and power on again the VPS. You should now be able to connect through ssh.

Step 2: through SSH

Confirm that you succesfully logged in.

Clone the repository on the VPS with

git clone https://github.com/Fran314/nixos.git .dotfiles/nixos

(Note that the link is an https:// and not a git@ because the VPS doesn't have, and shouldn't have, credentials)