This configuration makes heavy use of Nix Flakes in order to separate functionality and allow testing of modular blocks without running a whole system rebuild.
Nix Flakes are a similar concept to a Rust Crate or a Mix Elixir Project, in that they allow declarative declarations of dependencies that are pinned in a lock file.
Structure
Nix flakes are structured with three specified sections:
description→ A textual description of the flake’s purposeinputs→ A list of input URLs of other flakes to draw fromoutputs→ The modules, attributes or executables produced from the flake.
Warning
While flakes end in a
.nixextension much like regular files, they are not parsed as such, but with specific flake parsing rules. The error messages for this are obtuse, so watch out.Inside the
outputssection is the only area where normal language rules apply.