Package

In the context of this configuration a package is a group of modules which have been separated from the main configuration tree.

Benefits

This has a number of benefits for both ease of use and configuration:

• Packages become their own entities and can be used anywhere which has nix installed with the nix run <package url> command
• Small configuration changes become much easier to test when a full rebuild of the system with sudo nixos-rebuild switch does not need to be done.

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Package Shells

All of the packages in the packages/ directory are designed to be both:

• Importable as a set of modules into the main configuration
• Launchable as an isolated shell process which cleans up any changes made to the configuration afterwards

Home Manager Shell: Introduction

This can achieved through the incredibly useful Home Manager Shell tool, which allows for exactly this with module configurations in the style of home manager.

In practice, this allows for a far more general way to achieve what projects like nixvim do for testing configuration changes with a temporary process started with nix run .. As you can imagine this allows other workflows such as:

• Configuring your window manager to look exactly the way you want
• Testing a bunch of UI widgets
• Fiddling with configuration options for language servers entirely without rebuilding the whole system, which save significant amounts of time over the course of the configuration.

Flake Setup

An example flake which can achieve this may look like:

{
  description = "Flake exposing home manager config for neovim";
 
  inputs = {
	# Import the home-manager-shell flake library from it's github
    home-manager-shell.url = "github:dermetfan/home-manager-shell";
    home-manager.follows = "home-manager-shell/home-manager";
	
	# Import the flake-utils flake library from it's github
    flake-utils.follows = "home-manager-shell/flake-utils";
  };
 
  outputs = {
    self,
    flake-utils,
    home-manager-shell,
    ...
  }:
	# Execute code for every possible nix system
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system: {
	  # Expose an application for running with `nix run .`
      apps.default = flake-utils.lib.mkApp {
        drv = home-manager-shell.lib {
          inherit self system;
		  
		  # Optional home manager extra special args
		  # These can be whatever you want and are
		  # Passed into any modules in your setup as
		  # arguements
          args.extraSpecialArgs.neovimStyle = "gruvbox";
        };
      };
    })
    
	# Expose the modules to the public to allow them to be
	# Imported later
    // rec {
      modules = ./default.nix;
      homeManagerProfiles.luke = modules;
    };
}