Do you guys always manually type wpa_supplicant command every time connecting to a wifi?

Help
5

You can also use Network Manager; this way you won’t have to specify the networks in your NixOS configuration, and Network Manager will connect automatically after sleep/reboot/etc. Jon Ringer’s answer is a visually pleasing intro.

The way I set it up:

  1. In /etc/nixos/configuration.nix, I had to add my user to the networkmanager group. The example from Chapter 7. User Management in the NixOS manual shows how:

    users.users.alice = {
  home = "/home/alice";
  extraGroups = [ "wheel" "networkmanager" ];
  # ...
};

    (Here’s the reference docs for users.users.<your-username>.extraGroups NixOS option.)

  2. Next (from Chris Martin’s Installing NixOS post):

    Now you’ll want to turn on the network manager which can manage your WPA keys so you don’t have to keep manually messing with wpa_supplicant .

    Replace

    networking.wireless.enable = true;

    with

    networking.networkmanager.enable = true;

    Also add kde4.networkmanagement to the package list to get a GUI for it.

  3. sudo nixos-rebuild switch

Then the commands that I usually use:

  • nmcli device wifi list
  • nmcli device wifi connect "wifi-name" password 'password'

I use an old Lenovo T520 laptop, and the Network Manager sometimes acts up with different error messages every time after coming back from sleep or reboot, but then this usually helps:

sudo systemctl restart wpa_supplicant.service dhcpcd.service NetworkManager.service
1 Like