Dotfiles

Declarative configuration for my machines, built with Nix flakes, nix-darwin, NixOS, and home-manager. This repository replaces the older setup where $HOME itself was a Git repository.

Hosts:

Host	Platform	User	Machine
AM-H6MRWRT99L	aarch64-darwin	lmai	Work MacBook Pro
nixos	x86_64-linux	locmai	Personal ThinkPad X1 Carbon

No credentials, tokens, or hashed passwords are stored here. Work-only aliases live in ~/.aliases_axon, which is sourced when present but never tracked.

Layout

• flake.nix: entrypoint, one output per host
• base/: shared baseline for every host, plus the primaryUser and dotfilesRoot options
• hosts/: one file per machine, each importing the modules it needs
  • hosts/hardware/: generated hardware configuration for NixOS hosts
• modules/: composable modules that hosts mix and match
  • agents: Claude Code and Pi configuration, linked from ~/projects/lmai/agent-setup
  • cli: shell tools, language servers, Kubernetes and IaC tooling
  • dotfiles: the actual config files under modules/dotfiles/home
  • gui: desktop applications, fonts, and system defaults
  • hyprland: Wayland session for the NixOS host
  • personal: personal-machine applications
  • work: work-specific packages and casks
• pkgs/: custom packages, exposed as pkgs.unofficial.<name>
• scripts/rebuild.py: platform wrapper around nixos-rebuild and darwin-rebuild
• .github/workflows/test.yaml: builds every host on Linux and macOS runners

Modules follow the same shape: default.nix as the entrypoint, with darwin.nix and linux.nix holding platform-specific parts. base/ picks the platform file from platform.parsed.kernel.name.

Inputs and overlays

The flake tracks the 26.05 releases of nixpkgs, nix-darwin, and home-manager, with nixpkgs-unstable alongside them. nixos-hardware supplies the ThinkPad profile, and sofka provides its overlay.

Two overlays are applied to every host:

• pkgs.unstable.<name>: the same package from nixpkgs-unstable
• pkgs.unofficial.<name>: packages defined in pkgs/

Host options

Each host file sets primaryUser.username; primaryUser.fullName defaults to Loc Mai and primaryUser.authorizedKeys to an empty list. dotfilesRoot is the checkout path relative to $HOME and is only used when DOTFILES_DIR is not set.

Dotfiles

Files under modules/dotfiles/home are mapped to the same path under $HOME. They are symlinked to this checkout rather than copied into the Nix store, so editing a config applies immediately without a rebuild. The checkout location is detected automatically from the directory you run make in (exported as DOTFILES_DIR with impure eval), so the repo can live anywhere. When built without that variable it falls back to dotfilesRoot (default projects/locmai/dotfiles, relative to $HOME), which you can override in a host file.

Adding a new dotfile only requires dropping it in the right place under modules/dotfiles/home and rebuilding once so the symlink is created.

Usage

Diff the pending configuration against the running system, then apply it:

make

The host defaults to hostname -s. Override it to build another machine:

make build host=nixos

Other targets:

make switch    # apply the configuration
make diff      # show what would change
make update    # update flake.lock
make fmt       # format all Nix files
make check     # nix flake check
make clean     # collect garbage older than 30 days
make optimise  # deduplicate the Nix store

build and switch run with --impure so the dotfiles module can read DOTFILES_DIR. Garbage collection and store optimisation also run automatically through nix.gc and nix.optimise.

Nix files are formatted with nixfmt (RFC style): run make fmt before committing, and make check plus a make build for the affected host to validate a change.

Installation

macOS

1. Allow Full Disk Access for the terminal in Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access
2. Clone this repository to ~/projects/locmai/dotfiles
3. Run make switch, which installs Nix and Homebrew if they are missing
4. Reboot

NixOS

Boot the installer ISO, partition the disk, and generate the hardware configuration:

nixos-generate-config --root /mnt

Copy the result into hosts/hardware/nixos.nix, then install:

nixos-install --flake .#nixos

Set the account password from the installer or a root shell with passwd locmai, since no credentials are committed here.

Migrating from the $HOME Git repository

The previous setup tracked configuration files directly in $HOME. After the first make switch, home-manager owns those paths, so remove the old checkout:

rm -rf ~/.git

Any file that home-manager had to move aside is kept with an .hm-backup suffix.