An unofficial NixOS & Flakes book for beginners

Guides
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@ryan4yin absolutely wonderful, this is exactly what we need. A more detailed resource on all things new cli and flakes.

I quickly glimpsed over it, what I noticed is that there are quite a lot of spelling and grammatic mistakes, so you might want to correct that.

Other than that I love the idea, and I really like how much is already covered in that book. I hope there will be many more people who contribute to it, so it can become a bigger, up-to-date and best practice resource we did not have yet.

There was basically only zero-to-nix, but that was not comprehensive at all.

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EDIT: I have just made a lot of optimizations to the book.

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I began just few weeks ago with this wonderful distro, but I was puzzled by the fact that all the docs I found were about traditionnal configuration.nix and all the valuable examples I found were about Flakes.

Just, your preface help me a lot, I can’t wait to read the whole book. It’s the doc I was looking for. Many thanks.

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Can please clarify about using overlays for downgrading packages?

In your book you use specialArgs to make stable repository available to modules. But the official wiki advises to use overlays:

outputs = { self, nixpkgs, nixpkgs-unstable }:
    let
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      overlay-unstable = final: prev: {
        unstable = nixpkgs-unstable.legacyPackages.${prev.system};
        # use this variant if unfree packages are needed:
        # unstable = import nixpkgs-unstable {
        #   inherit system;
        #   config.allowUnfree = true;
        # };

      };
    in {
      nixosConfigurations."<hostname>" = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
        inherit system;
        modules = [
          # Overlays-module makes "pkgs.unstable" available in configuration.nix
          ({ config, pkgs, ... }: { nixpkgs.overlays = [ overlay-unstable ]; })
          ./configuration.nix
        ];
      };
    };

See here: Flakes - NixOS Wiki

I’m just a beginner, can you please describe the difference?

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Yes, the overlays given by the nixos wiki and the specialArgs given by me both accomplish the same thing.

I chose to use specialArgs because I think it’s a bit more understandable and user-friendly. It took me a while to figure out how overlays work.

Technically I don’t see any advantage or disadvantage to either way, it’s up to you which one you prefer to use.

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I just wanted to say, this is an excellent piece of work.

I had somehow missed this announcement thread, and perhaps others have too given the lack of comments. But I found the book via a fedi post a few weeks ago.

This is what a user-journey-focused introduction (through to quite advanced!) guide should look like. Truly great work and something I will recommend heartily.

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