At the top of my hardware-configuration.nix there is a nice warning not to edit the file as it may be overwritten:
# Do not modify this file! It was generated by ‘nixos-generate-config’
# and may be overwritten by future invocations. Please make changes
# to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix instead.
I admit that I’ve edited it a bunch, as to me it makes sense to put things there like filesystem mount options, swap file options, auto-unlock settings for luks volumes, kernel boot parameters. In my mind these are mostly specific to the machine and make sense to go there. If I was moving to a new machine I would mostly copy configuration.nix, not hardware-configuration.nix.
I know I could heed the warning and put all my changes into configuration.nix instead, but I’m wondering in practice whether that’s worthwhile.
How strictly do you heed this warning, and avoid editing this file?
You are free to create any structure you want. If you have multiple machines, you would very quickly start modularizing the setup anyway and come up with an entirely new structure.
I make changes to it when I need. One example in which you can’t really on nixos-generate-config is it doesn’t work well with btrfs, it doesn’t include all mounts options.
After installation I maintain that file completely by hand.
The parts that change the most are usually related to how partitions are mounted. And I hate how nixos-generate-config always creates mount points for ephemerally mounted drives. So I had to remove them manually anyway.
And change all the /dev/disk/by-uuid/* to /dev/disk/by-label/*…
One thing I didn’t see mentioned so far is that one benefit of not editing hardware-configuration.nix is that you can in theory re-run nixos-generate-config and get the same output (or at least something relatively similar).
This can be helpful in the following situations:
You’ve made some changes to hardware-configuration.nix but they are causing problems, so you want to go back to the “default”. (Although in this situation it might be better to just version control your NixOS configuration.)
You’ve upgraded to a later version of NixOS, and you want to see if there have been any changes to nixos-generate-config that give you a configuration more appropriate for your hardware (or a recent kernel). If you’ve edited hardware-configuration.nix by hand, it can be a little difficult to make out what changes are necessary and need to be copied over, and which things are just strict improvements by people in how nixos-generate-config works.
Personally, I’m quite strict about it, for the reasons @cdepillabout mentions.
It’s no real additional effort to override the configuration in configuration.nix if need be, and I think that’s preferable - the config needs to be somewhere after all, no harm in having the autogenerated file around as well, even if I override its settings a bit.
To be honest, as network and DHCP config has moved from generated configuration.nix to hardware-configuration.nix somewhen between 19.09 and 22.05, there has to happen careful manual join anyway, whether you edited the hardware configuration or not.
Who knows whether or not the network was the first or the last or neither.
I realize that my earlier mail came across little “short”.
There is nothing magical about the filenames generated other than configuration.nix (outside flakes). You could easily store the hardware configuration in a file named after your favourite character in “Veep” or “Arrested Development” (both fantastic shows btw, but I digress).
Yes, nixos-generate-config will write out hardware-configuration.nix but the generated configuration is really just meant as inspiration for you to get started and you will inevitably end up with “hardware configuration” spread out over multiple files/modules as you start accomodating new hardware.
