CHANGELOG.md

NH Changelog

Unreleased

Changed

• nh os info now hides empty columns.
• nh os info now support --fields to select which field(s) to display; also add a per-generation "Closure Size" coloumn. (#375)
• nh os switch and nh os boot now support the --install-bootloader flag, which will explicitly set NIXOS_INSTALL_BOOTLOADER for switch-to-configuration. Bootloader behaviour was previously supported by explicitly passing the variable to nh commands, which has now been made explicit through the --install-bootloader flag. (#424)
• A --run flag was added to nh os build-vm, which allows immediately starting a built VM after the build is complete. This can be chained with other build-vm flags such as --with-bootloader.
• Switched from owo-colors to Yansi as the internal coloring library. This should not affect end-users, but please create an issue if you notice anything different.
• nh os info now hides empty fields by default, they can be explicitly shown via the --fields flag.
• nh completions now supports nushell
• nh os switch now accepts a --show-systemctl-hints flag that displays failing systemd units at the end of the rebuild log. This flag can be used to replicate the activation behaviour from nixos-rebuild where failing units are displayed at the end.
  • NH also allows making this the global default by setting NH_SHOW_SYSTEMCTL_HINTS. This is useful if you miss the behaviour from nixos-rebuild where this is default without a way of suppressing those.

Fixed

• Fixed the whitespace splitting of self-elevated commands so spaces inside quotes don't get separated.

Removed

• Shell completion generation has been moved OUT of the main NH CLI, and is now done via cargo-xtask in the packaging step. The nh completions command is now fully deprecated and shell completion can be done with cargo xtask completions or cargo xtask dist.

4.2.0

Changed

• Nh checks are now more robust in the sense that unnecessary features will not be required when the underlying command does not depend on them.
• The --update-input flag now supports being specified multiple times.
• The --update-input flag no longer requires --update in order to take effect, and both flags are now considered mutually exclusive. If you specify the --update flag, all flake inputs will be updated. If you specify the --update-input NAME flag, only the specified flake(s) will be updated.
• nh darwin switch now shows the output from the darwin-rebuild activation. This allows you to see more details about the activation from nix-darwin, as well as Home Manager.
• nvd is replaced by dix, resulting in saner and faster diffing.
• Nh now supports a new --diff flag, which takes one of auto always never and toggles displaying the package diff after a build.
• Manpages have been added to nh, and will be available as man 1 nh if the package vendor provides them.
• nh clean will now skip directories that are checked and don't exist. Instead of throwing an error, it will print a warning about which directories were skipped.
• nh's verbosity flag can now be passed multiple times for more verbose debug output.
• nh search will now use the system trust store for it's HTTPS requests.
• Error handling has been improved across the board, with more contextful errors replacing direct error propagation or unwraps.
• The directory traversal during nh clean has been improved slightly and relevant bits of the clean module has been sped up.
  • It's roughly %4 faster according to testing, but IO is still a limiting factor and results may differ.
• Added more context to some minor debug messages across platform commands.
• Nh now supports alternative privilege escalation methods. Namely doas, run0 and a fallback pkexec strategies will be attempted if the system does not use sudo.
• Nh will correctly prompt you for your sudo password while deploying remotely. This helps mitigate the need to allow password-less sudo on the target host to deploy remotely.

Fixed

• Nh will now correctly detect non-semver version strings, such as x.ygit. Instead of failing the check, we now try to normalize the string and simply skip the check with a warning.
• In the case system switch is disabled (system.switch enable = false;) Nh will provide a more descriptive error message hinting at what might be the issue. (#331)
  • We cannot accurately guess what the issue is, but this should be more graceful than simply throwing an error about a missing path (what path?)
• Nh will now carefully pick environment variables passed to individual commands. This resolves the "$HOME is not owned by you!" error, but it's also a part of a larger refactor that involves only providing relevant variables to individual commands. This is an experimental change, please let us know if you face any new bugs. (#314)
• Fixed a tempdir race condition causing activation failures. #386

4.1.2

Changed

• The environment and Nix feature checks have been made more robust, which should allow false positives caused by the initial implementation
  • Version normalization for the Nix version is now much more robust. This gets rid of unexpected breakage when using, e.g., pkgs.nixVersions.git
• Support for additional Nix variants have been added. This allows for us to handle non-supported Nix variants gracefully, treating them as mainline Nix.
• Version check regex in checks module is now compiled only once, instead of in a loop.

4.1.1

Changed

• Nh is now built on Cargo 2024 edition. This does not imply any changes for the users, but contributors might need to adapt.

• nh os build and nh os build-vm now default to placing the output at ./result instead of a temp directory.

Fixed

• The Elasticsearch backend version has been updated to v43, which fixes failing search commands (#316)

4.1.0

Added

• A new nh os rollback subcommand has been added to allow rolling back a generation, or to a specific generation with the --to flag. See nh os rollback --help for more details on this subcommand.

• Nh now supports the --build-host and --target-host cli arguments

• Nh now checks if the current Nix implementation has necessary experimental features enabled. In mainline Nix (CppNix, etc.) we check for nix-command and flakes being set. In Lix, we also use repl-flake as it is still provided as an experimental feature in versions below 2.93.0.

• Nh will now check if you are using the latest stable, or "recommended," version of Nix (or Lix.) This check has been placed to make it clear we do not support legacy/vulnerable versions of Nix, and encourage users to update if they have not yet done so.

• NixOS: Nh now accepts the subcommand nh os build-vm, which builds a virtual machine image activation script instead of a full system. This includes a new option --with-bootloader/-B that applies to just build-vm, to build a VM with a bootloader.

Changed

• Darwin: Use darwin-rebuild directly for activation instead of old scripts
• Darwin: Future-proof handling of activate-user script removal
• Darwin: Improve compatibility with root-only activation in newer nix-darwin versions
• NixOS: Check if the target hostname matches the running system hostname before running nvd to compare them.

4.0.3

Added

• Nh now supports specifying NH_SUDO_ASKPASS to pass a custom value to SUDO_ASKPASS in self-elevation. If specified, sudo will be called with -A and the NH_SUDO_ASKPASS will be SUDO_ASKPASS locally.

Fixed

• Fix --configuration being ignored in nh home switch (#262)

4.0.2

Added

• Add --json to nh search, which will return results in JSON format. Useful for parsing the output of nh search with, e.g., jq.

4.0.1

Removed

• NixOS 24.05 is now marked as deprecated, and will emit an error if the search command attempts to use it for the channel. While the Elasticsearch backend still seems to support 24.05, it is deprecated in Nixpkgs and is actively discouraged. Please update your system at your earliest convenience.