And no, I do not want to use home-manager. I just want to create 2-3 basic and shot config files like .zshrc or .vimrc. I don’t want to pull in all of home-manager just to create a few files. Is there a way to do that?
Or would I have to write some kind of Systemd service running a script that would do that for me at first login or something like that?
Have you considered using either skeleton files which is a common concept on linuxes?
Or alternatively using the activation script to create the files? As far as I remember there is an option available that allows you to extend the activation script.
For every user? If so then security.pam.makeHomeDir.skelDirectory is probably what you want.
If not… any more details?
Oh, I wasn’t aware this was exposed in Nix. Thank you, this seems like the perfect solution for me.
I assume I can create the value for skelDirectory from a derivation that would contain the basic configuration. I like that approach, it’s very clean.
I tried googling a bunch but all I ever get for questions about nixos and user configuration is “use home-manager”, but that just seems like a massive overkill just for some basic user configuration.
That’s interesting. That’s more tangentially related to my OP question, but what option handles this activation script? For my personal user I keep dotfiles in a separate repo and just symlink them with a simple bash script when NixOS installation is done, but an activation script would be nice.
Are you referring to this?
https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=20.09&query=system.userActivationScripts