nixos-wsl-starter

My personal NixOS development environment on WSL, based on LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter.

• home.nix: install packages. Search for packages: https://search.nixos.org.

If you want to update the versions of the available unstable-packages, run nix flake update to pull the latest version of the Nixpkgs repository and then apply the changes.

FIXME: comments mention problems that should be fixed, while CONFIG: refer to configuration you might want to change.

What Is Included

• The default shell is fish
• Native docker (ie. Linux, not Windows) is enabled by default
• The prompt is Starship
• fzf, lsd, zoxide, and broot are integrated into fish by default
  • These can all be disabled easily by setting enable = false in home.nix, or just removing the lines all together
• direnv is integrated into fish by default
• git config is generated in home.nix with options provided to enable private HTTPS clones with secret tokens
• fish config is generated in home.nix and includes git aliases, useful WSL aliases

Quickstart

• Get the latest release
• Install it (tweak the command to your desired paths):

wsl --import NixOS .\NixOS\ .\nixos-wsl.tar.gz --version 2

• Enter the distro:

wsl -d NixOS

• Get a copy of this repo (you'll probably want to fork it eventually):

git clone https://github.com/eevdev/nixos-wsl-starter.git /tmp/configuration
cd /tmp/configuration

• Change the username to your desired username in flake.nix
• Apply the configuration and shutdown the WSL2 VM

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /tmp/configuration && sudo shutdown -h now

• Reconnect to the WSL2 VM

wsl -d NixOS

• cd ~ and then pwd should now show /home/<YOUR_USERNAME>
• Move the configuration to your new home directory

mv /tmp/configuration ~/configuration

• Go through all the CONFIG: notices in this repo to check what can be configured
• Apply the configuration

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/configuration

Project Layout

In order to keep the template as approachable as possible for new NixOS users, this project uses a flat layout without any nesting or modularization.

• flake.nix is where dependencies are specified
  • nixpkgs is the current release of NixOS
  • nixpkgs-unstable is the current trunk branch of NixOS (ie. all the latest packages)
  • home-manager is used to manage everything related to your home directory (dotfiles etc.)
  • nur is the community-maintained Nix User Repositories for packages that may not be available in the NixOS repository
  • nixos-wsl exposes important WSL-specific configuration options
  • nix-index-database tells you how to install a package when you run a command which requires a binary not in the $PATH
• wsl.nix is where the VM is configured
  • The hostname is set here
  • The default shell is set here
  • User groups are set here
  • WSL configuration options are set here
  • NixOS options are set here
• home.nix is where packages, dotfiles, terminal tools, environment variables and aliases are configured